On April 16, 2025, To regain trust in the troubled Mantra Network, CEO John Mullin pledged to burn all his team’s tokens distribution, in a dramatic move to win back the support of a disappointed community, Mantra took action after the OM token, the key to its real-world asset platform, crashed badly on April 13. The token’s price fell from $6.30 to just 52 cents. This huge drop wiped out more than $5.5 billion in value, leaving many investors shocked, according to CoinGecko data.
In dealing with the situation on X on 16 April, Mullin announced his plan to give up the 300 million OM tokens, amounting to 16.88% of the close 1.78 billion overall supply, initially reserved for the team and main members. Worth around $236 million at the present price of 78 cents per token, these assets were secured and scheduled for gradual release between April 2027 and October 2029, as described by the company blog post published on 8 April. “By destroying our tokens,” Mullin wrote, “we want to show our dedication. The community and investors can decide if I have established their trust in me”.
The declaration has provoked a divided reaction. While certain members of the Mantra community have praised Mullin’s concession as a sincere olive branch, others, including Crypto Banter founder Ran Neuner, are alert to its risks. This could have negative consequences,” Neuner argued. “If the team loses its incentives, they may not be motivated to create long-term value.” To address this issue, Mullin suggested holding a decentralised vote to decide what happens to the 300 million tokens, showing his pledge to empower the community to make decisions.
At the same time, Mantra is taking steps to its $109 million Ecosystem Fund to maintain OM’s price, with Mullin suggesting possible token buybacks and extra burns. In an interview with Cointelegraph on 14 April, he assured a coming “post-mortem” to examine the reason behind the crash, strengthening his commitment to transparency. The company acted quickly to stop rumours of wrongdoing, strongly denying claims of insider trading or market tampering. Mantra says the price drop was caused by “careless sell-offs” linked to outside market factors, not any mistakes within the company.
The crash has closely examined leading exchanges like Binance and OKX, which achieved substantial OM trading activity in the time leading up to the crash. Both of these platforms have denied accusations of wrongdoing, indicating instead a volatile trigger by changes to Mantra’s tokenomics in October; they say it caused a chain reaction of large sell-offs across exchanges on April 13.
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