OM Token Crash: By Ignoring Bitcoin's Simple Value Proposition, Altcoins Will Continue to Suffer

The crypto community was quick to draw comparisons to LUNA's infamous collapse in May 2022, speculating whether this could mark the beginning of another bearish cycle.

The crypto community was quick to draw comparisons to LUNA’s infamous collapse in May 2022, speculating whether this could mark the beginning of another bearish cycle. But unlike previous industry meltdowns, the OM crash barely moved the needle on Bitcoin’s price — a telling sign of how the broader market has matured.

What happened to OM?

Mantra is a layer-1 blockchain focused on decentralized finance (DeFi) applications like staking, lending, and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. It made headlines earlier this year after securing a $1 billion deal with Dubai-based developer DAMAC Group to tokenize real estate in the Middle East.

Riding the wave of RWA hype, OM surged over 583% between November 2024 and its February peak — gains that were completely erased last Sunday. According to Mantra’s press release based on “independent observations”, the meltdown began with forced OM position closures during low-volume trading hours. These initial liquidations drove down the price, triggering automated margin calls on leveraged positions using OM as collateral. This created a cascading sell-off, exacerbated by price disparities between major exchanges like OKX and Binance. Mantra emphasized that the team did not sell any tokens during the collapse.

Still, many analysts suspect foul play, pointing to signs of a coordinated rug pull. On April 13, $66.97 million worth of OM positions were liquidated in just 12 hours, crashing the OM price. However, the underlying fragility had been growing for months. Reportedly, up to 90% of OM tokens — roughly 792 million — were held by the founding team, leaving a tiny circulating supply and making the market extremely sensitive to sell pressure.

Leading up to the crash, on-chain data showed 17 wallets transferring 43.6 million OM (worth ~$227 million) to exchanges — about 4.5% of the circulating supply. Meanwhile, rumors of off-exchange sales at 50% discounts only deepened market skepticism.

The result? A textbook liquidity death spiral. With few tokens circulating and even fewer buyers during a low-liquidity weekend, large holders exited en masse, overwhelming the order books and collapsing the price.

OM isn’t LUNA

Mantra CEO John Mullin eventually addressed the incident publicly, including in an interview with YouTuber Coffeezilla. When pressed about alleged OTC deals and price manipulation, Mullin admitted that $30–45 million was sold over-the-counter by the team, with $10 million reinjected into OM in mid-2024 — a move he denied constituted price pumping. Coffeezilla, unsurprisingly, disagreed.

Mantra's official press release arrived three days after the crash, alongside a tweet from Mullin pledging to burn his OM tokens to restore community trust. But the response did little to calm nerves, as memories of LUNA’s collapse were still too fresh for many.

Yet despite surface-level similarities, OM’s crash is fundamentally different from LUNA’s. OM wasn’t tied to an algorithmic stablecoin or backed by BTC reserves. There was no protocol malfunction per se. This was a pure execution-based collapse, driven by centralized token control and opaque off-market sales. Scale matters too: while OM lost $5.4 billion in value, LUNA’s collapse erased over $40 billion.

Most importantly, LUNA’s failure sparked a chain reaction, triggering the collapse of FTX and plunging the space into a year-long crypto winter. OM’s implosion, in contrast, barely made ripples beyond its own ecosystem.

Bitcoin: unshaken, unbothered

Perhaps the most telling part of the OM crash is bitcoin’s indifference. The flagship cryptocurrency didn’t flinch, underscoring its growing independence from altcoins. The contrast is clear: while altcoins rely on protocol-specific use cases, marketing, and oftentimes pure speculation, Bitcoin’s simple value proposition as decentralized money continues to hold strong. So while altcoins continue to suffer from governance issues and manipulation, Bitcoin stands alone as a reliable decentralized asset.

This divergence is becoming more pronounced. Analyst Benjamin Cowen noted that bitcoin now commands an impressive 64% of the total crypto market share (69% when excluding stablecoins).

All in all, while OM’s collapse may have dimmed some of the RWA hype temporarily, the sector remains one of crypto’s most promising frontiers. The incident will likely go down not as a systemic risk — but as a cautionary tale about what happens when hype out runs fundamentals and insiders hold all the cards.