OM's peculiar crash

Bitcoin is flat, Ethereum is up and a bevy of altcoins are down on a Monday morning marked by a strange and scary situation with Mantra. The real-world-asset (RWA) enabler saw its native OM inexplicably crash on an otherwise lazy Sunday, resulting in more questions than answers.

"It's a big scandal to the whole industry," said one exchange executive, calling for on-chain sleuths to crack the case.

It's hardly any mystery which digital asset is dominating the charts on a daily basis — that would be EVM-interoperability-centric Flare (FLR).

The 78th-largest token, per CoinGecko, gained 9% in the past 24 hours as it seeks to reach two cents. FLR is up nearly 50% in the past week. Although do note that is more than two years removed from its ATH of 15 cents, reached at the start of 2023.

Checking on volatile, captive-to-centralized-policy U.S. equities, well, it seems the latest tariff curveball has a "risk-on" spin. We're talking about a Trump-issued exemption that'll help ease concerns about China-reliant technology companies (e.g. Apple). This prompted Dow futures to rally during early morning hours.

Trade war turmoil has sure benefitted gold-backed cryptos — PAXG and XAUT each gained than 20% so far this year — mirroring demand for gold ETFs (CoinDesk).

For no apparent reason, Mantra (OM) plunged by nearly 90%, from above $6 to $0.45, in mere hours yesterday, setting off a riveting whodunit straight out of an Agatha Christie novel.

Armchair detective work suggests low-liquidity conditions may have created a tinderbox-type situation. But could some outsized volume really have caused such a murderous move?

It was only about two months ago that OM, governance token of Mantra, a platform for tokenizing RWAs, hit its record high of $9. OM has traded between $6-$7 for the better part of the past month. In January, the platform announced it had partnered with a UAE-based company looking to tokenize a hefty amount of real estate assets.

At approximately noon (EST) yesterday, OM sat calmly, legs crossed, inhaling a $6.29 level. By 3 p.m. (EST), OM was chanting for its very existence as it sank below 50 cents, shedding more than $5B worth of market cap. "Today's activity was triggered by reckless liquidations, not anything to do with the project," the Mantra team said in an X post following the harrowing plunge, according to CoinDesk.

Mantra's co-founder John Patrick Mullin responded to cries of skullduggery coming from inside the community, with Mullin insisting that team members have not moved any tokens. Mullin is pointing the finger at one or more centralized exchanges forcefully closing out OM holders' positions.

The exact reason for the OM meltdown, one of the worst overnight vaporization events since the LUNA collapse three years ago, remained a mystery as of 9 a.m. (EST). Conspiracy theories abound and unconfirmed information regarding potentially relevant wallet moves is trickling into the public square, so please proceed with extreme caution. That said, OM had rebounded to roughly 70 cents as of 8:30 a.m. (EST), according to CoinGecko.

Big-time buyers of Bitcoin appear to be back on a spree. Michael Saylor's Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, having snapped up more than $7B worth of BTC in Q1, is signaling more purchases may be coming, per CoinDesk.

Additionally, Japan's Metaplanet just bought $26M worth of the largest crypto, according to Decrypt.

Metaplanet, a Tokyo-listed firm nicknamed “Asia’s MicroStrategy,” added 4,525 BTC, part of a stated plan to accumulate 10,000 BTC by the end of the year. Last month, the company appointed Eric Trump to its newly formed Strategic Advisory Board, citing his “passion for Bitcoin.”