MANTRA Token Crashes 18% to Record Low as Blockchain Halts

MANTRA's native token plunged 18.5% from its 24-hour high to an all-time low of $0.004126 around 11:00 pm UTC on Thursday, just before the MANTRA Chain blockchain stopped producing blocks and its team announced a precautionary halt. According to CoinGecko data, the token recovered modestly to approximately $0.0044 but remained down roughly 10% over 24 hours, while trading volume surged nearly 600% to $24 million. The sharp decline triggered a cascade of exchange responses, with multiple platforms pausing OM deposits and withdrawals until the network resumes operation.

The MANTRA team confirmed on Friday that it was "aware of an incident affecting MANTRA Chain" and had halted the network as a precaution while it investigates. "We don't have a root cause or timeline to share yet," the project stated, noting that all endpoints and transactions were frozen. The outage affected public endpoints, validators, bridge migration operations, and MANTRA-managed Inter-Blockchain Communication relays, with the network's public RPC listing block 17,449,398—produced at 11:13 pm UTC—as its latest block. The team has committed to not restarting the network until it is confident the chain is safe to operate. MANTRA has not disclosed whether the price movement was connected to the incident or whether any user assets were compromised.

The latest setback comes months after the April 2025 collapse of MANTRA's former OM token, which lost more than 90% of its value—from roughly $6.30 to below $0.50—wiping out over $5 billion in market capitalization in a single day. Following that crisis, CEO John Patrick Mullin began the process of burning his 150 million OM tokens. In June, Inveniam Capital Partners announced plans to acquire MANTRA after a $20 million investment in 2025, a move that followed January layoffs and restructuring as Mullin described 2025 as the project's most challenging year. Investors and validators are now awaiting a root-cause report from the MANTRA team before any timeline for network resumption and exchange service restoration can be established.