OM Token's 90% Crash Leaves Holders Reeling —MANTRA Blames 'Reckless Liquidations,' CEO Says 'Fixing This'

The native cryptocurrency of a real-world asset-focused project dramatically crashed by nearly 90% on Sunday, wiping out billions of dollars worth of investors' fortunes.

What happened: The OM token of Layer-1 blockchain MANTRA nosedived from $5.26 to $0.42 in 90 minutes in the afternoon. The sudden plunge erased a whopping $4.6 billion from the coin's market capitalization.

Moreover, the crash triggered liquidations of over $68 million for OM in the last 24 hours, according to Coinglass.

According to Lookonchain, about 17 wallets transferred $227 worth of OM tokens to exchanges, accounting for 4.5% of the circulating supply. Two of these addresses belong to Laser Digital, a "strategic" investor in MANTRA.

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MANTRA’s official X account stated that the crash was caused by “reckless liquidations” and had nothing to do with the project.

"One thing we want to be clear on: this was not our team. We are looking into it and will share more details about what happened as soon as we can," MANTRA added.

Additionally, the project's CEO, John Patrick Mullin, revealed that a "massive" forced liquidation from a large OM investor took place.

Why It Matters: MANTRA is designed for the tokenization of real-world assets, where the OM coin is used for securing the network. OM also has an ERC-20 version on the Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) network.

Interestingly, the coin blasted to an all-time high of $9.04 in February and was up nearly 60% year-to-date before the Sunday crash.

Price Action:  At the time of writing, OM was exchanging hands at $0.7559, down 87.96% in the last 24 hours, according to data from Benzinga Pro.

Image via Shutterstock

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