One of crypto's hottest RWA tokens just went cliff-diving without a parachute.

Mantra's OM token conjured memories of LUNA for many, plummeting over 90% in mere hours and vaporizing $5.5 billion in market cap in the time it takes to finish a corporate lunch break.

The once-darling RWA project is now at the center of crypto's latest whodunnit, with exchanges, founders, and angry traders all telling very different stories.

The Bloodbath

OM's price chart looks like someone threw it off a skyscraper on April 13th, dropping from $6.30 to a gut-wrenching $0.37 in just hours.

The massacre happened during the classic crypto danger zone—late Sunday evening UTC, when liquidity is thinner than any other time during the week.

By Monday, OM was limping along between $0.80 and $1.10, leaving shell-shocked holders wondering what the hell just happened.

This isn't just another -30% day in crypto—we're talking about a token that was up 42,000% in the past year suddenly losing nearly everything.

The Founder's Defense

JP Mullin, Mantra's founder, wasted no time blaming centralized exchanges for the carnage.

According to Mullin, "reckless forced closures" on exchanges triggered a liquidation cascade that spiraled out of control.

He's adamant that neither the team nor investors dumped their tokens, claiming all team allocations remain locked under their published vesting schedules.

"This wasn't caused by us or by our investors. All OM tokens are still locked up per our vesting schedule. No one on the team dumped anything," Mullin insisted, sounding about as convincing as Do Kwon circa May 2022.

Finger Pointing Everywhere

Exchange data tells a more complicated story that's making crypto Twitter raise some serious eyebrows.

Analytics show 3.9 million OM tokens were conveniently deposited on OKX just before things went south.

Even more sus—17 accounts moved a total of 43.6 million OM tokens onto exchanges right before disaster struck.

Open interest in OM futures collapsed from $345 million to $130 million as over $50 million in long positions got forcibly liquidated.

The CEO of OKX didn't mince words, calling this "a big scandal to the whole crypto industry" and promising to release all the receipts.

The Centralized Exchange Showdown

Binance is playing defense, noting they implemented risk controls for OM since October 2024.

They claim they've been warning users about OM's changing tokenomics and increased supply through pop-up warnings and reduced leverage.

OKX is taking a different approach, highlighting large on-chain deposits and withdrawals—some allegedly linked to Mantra's team—and suggesting coordination might have been at play.

Surprisingly, Mullin has praised Binance for their handling of the situation, which has only heightened suspicions about what's really going on behind the scenes.

The Road To Rekt

Before becoming crypto's latest cautionary tale, Mantra was absolutely crushing it.

The Dubai-based project, licensed by VARA, had scored billion-dollar partnerships with real estate giants to tokenize luxury properties and data centers.

OM had rocketed from $0.0158 in January 2024 to nearly $9 by February 2025—enough to turn a $1,000 investment into almost $570,000.

Now those gains are mostly gone, and holders are left with receipts for an RWA token that turned out to be way riskier than the "real world" part would suggest.

The Hard Lessons

This meltdown highlights everything that's still broken in crypto despite all our talk about maturity and institutional adoption.

Concentrated token ownership (Mantra's team controlled nearly 90% of tokens) remains a massive systemic risk.

Leveraged trading on CEXs can still trigger death spirals that destroy projects in hours.

And the gap between a token's supposed utility and its reality can still be wider than the Grand Canyon.

What Happens Next?

Mullin is trying to frame this as just another bump in the road for a team that has "survived and operated throughout multiple market cycles."

Exchanges are promising investigations while quietly adding more risk controls to their OM trading pairs.

And the rest of the RWA sector is desperately trying to distance itself from the fallout, insisting that Mantra is the exception, not the rule.

One thing's certain—the OM crash is now part of crypto history, joining LUNA, FTX, and all the other dramatic collapses that remind us this industry still has a lot of growing up to do