MANTRA Halts OM Blockchain After Exploit, Dropping Token 18.5% to Record Low

OM, the native altcoin of the RWA-focused MANTRA Chain, crashed 18.5% to a record low of $0.004126 late Thursday before the network stopped producing blocks and its team imposed a precautionary freeze. Market data shows the token slid from $0.005060 to that level at roughly 11:10 pm UTC, then recovered to about $0.0044, still down nearly 10% over 24 hours. Trading volume climbed around 600% to approximately $24 million as the disruption became public. MANTRA posted its initial incident notice at 11:44 pm UTC, saying it was aware of an incident affecting MANTRA Chain and that all endpoints and transactions were frozen. The chain’s status page classified the event as a full outage spanning public endpoints, validators, bridge migration operations and MANTRA-managed Inter-Blockchain Communication relays. Block production had stopped at block 17,449,398, timestamped 11:13 pm UTC, according to the network’s RPC status indicator. The halt notice arrived roughly half an hour after the token’s intraday bottom. The project said it would not restart until it was confident the chain was safe, and affected exchanges paused OM deposits and withdrawals without a stated resumption timeline. MANTRA has not yet said whether the price drop was connected to the incident or whether any assets were placed at risk.

In a subsequent update, the project’s official status page identified the cause as an exploit. An attacker, MANTRA said, had exploited a vulnerability in an upstream dependency — software developed outside the network that MANTRA Chain relies on. The affected asset, OM, is an altcoin whose transfers were frozen along with all other chain activity. Developers located the flaw and are preparing a patched release, but validators remain offline, and restarting the chain requires coordination with the wider group of network operators. The team is tracing fund movements and cooperating with exchanges while it assesses damage. It has not disclosed which dependency was exploited, how the attack worked, or whether any tokens were drained. MANTRA added that its assessment of the full impact is ongoing and that it cannot yet confirm the complete scope. The official update also listed the outage footprint: public endpoints, validators, bridge migration operations and MANTRA-managed relays used to communicate with other blockchains. The freeze is designed to stop further movement while the vulnerable component is isolated. The exploit was disclosed roughly 30 minutes after the last block was produced, around the same time that market data had recorded the token’s low.

The latest freeze lands on a project that has already suffered a dramatic collapse. In April 2025, the earlier OM altcoin plunged more than 90% within hours, falling from an all-time high of roughly $6.30 to below $0.50 and wiping out over $5 billion in market value; MANTRA attributed that sell-off to forced liquidations of large leveraged positions. The chain has since pitched itself as an institutional Layer-1 for tokenized real-world assets, drawing backing from Nomura Group’s Laser Digital and Brevan Howard Digital. MANTRA raised $11 million in 2024 and later launched a $108.8 million ecosystem fund. Inveniam Capital Partners, which had invested $20 million in the project, announced plans in June to acquire MANTRA, with completion expected in the third quarter. Market data published earlier in the session had put OM’s 24-hour decline near 8% before the drop extended, leaving the current drawdown closer to 10%. Thursday’s outage leaves deposit and withdrawal resumptions tied to the chain’s restart timeline. No restart date has been provided, and the acquisition and institutional backing are now being tested by an incident whose full financial impact has yet to be quantified.

Taken together, the three updates trace a single arc: a software supply-chain failure at an RWA-focused network, an abrupt market repricing, and an investigation that has not yet produced a loss figure. The primary-source record is clear so far. On-chain block data fixes the halt at block 17,449,398 at 11:13 pm UTC, and the protocol’s own incident updates attribute the outage to an upstream dependency vulnerability while describing a patched release in preparation. What the public record does not yet contain is equally important — no attacker transaction hash, no confirmed drained amount, and no named dependency. The confirmed remediation is the precautionary freeze itself and the planned validator-coordinated restart. Until MANTRA publishes a post-mortem, those two facts — the chain’s final block and the project’s own incident account — remain the only confirmed anchors for the OM altcoin.