Mantra CEO Pledges to Burn His Team Tokens After Major 90% OM Crash

The co-founder and CEO of Mantra has pledged to burn all of his allocated “team tokens” in a bid to restore faith in the project, days after its OM token crashed 90% in an hour.

Mantra co-founder and CEO John Patrick Mullin tweeted Tuesday that he would burn all of his tokens from the “Team and Core Contributor” allocation, which starts vesting in April 2027.

“I’m planning to burn all of my team tokens and when we turn it around the community and investors can decide if I have earned it back,” he said, adding that, “We will create a comprehensive burn program for other parts of the OM supply.”

The exact details on the size of the burn is still being worked out, Mullin confirmed in a reply, but he wants it to be “as large as [he] can possibly make it.” He added that other team members have also reached out to him in support of the burn plan.

The Mantra crash

Mantra’s OM token dived from $6 to below $0.4 in just an hour late Sunday, with its team blaming “reckless liquidations” for the crash. Per archived CoinGecko data, OM was the 23rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap at $6.46 billion on Friday, ahead of the likes of Litecoin, Polkadot, and Hyperliquid. Now, it has fallen out of the top 100, with a market cap of just $740 million.

Mantra is a layer-1 blockchain designed for tokenizing real-world assets, with a focus on regulatory compliance, having partnered with the likes of Google Cloud and Dubai property development company DAMAC Group.

In an official statement, Mantra denied that Sunday’s crash had “anything to do with the project” and its team, with Mullin suggesting in an interview with crypto detective Coffeezilla that the liquidations took place on a major centralized exchange. 

The Mantra team “did not sell a single OM,” Mullin told Coffeezilla, adding that, “The team also did not get liquidated, we don’t have leverage positions on exchanges, we don’t do that.” He argued that it was feasible there were a lot of people (or groups of people) with large amounts of capital in OM.

However, some have raised concerns over Mantra’s use of over-the-counter deals, with Coffeezilla alleging that they were used to artificially inflate OM’s price. 

Mullin admitted that Mantra sold $20 to $30 million worth of OM over-the-counter to an unnamed group or individual and used the funds to perform $5 to $10 million worth of buybacks via its market makers. Coffeezilla framed this as price manipulation, while Mullin claimed this was simply done to maintain a healthy market in low liquidity scenarios.

“This is not a buyback to pump, this is more of a ‘make sure that it can be supported’,” the CEO said. “We’ve never put in levels of support or anything, it’s more just a discretionary: this is going to be used to enter the market over the next 30 days, or something.”

“That can have a positive impact on the price but I won’t necessarily say that will ‘pump’ the price,” Mullin added. “You can use bids to do a lot of different things. It can be to protect downside, it can also be to support to the upside.”

The co-founder said these effective buy backs took place from its launch in April until early fall, a period in which the token only increased by 58%, according to CoinGecko data.