- Mantra CEO John Patrick Mullin has pledged to burn all of his team-allocated OM tokens in an effort to restore community trust after the token’s value crashed by 90% in just one hour.
- The move comes amid controversy surrounding alleged price manipulation and over-the-counter deals, which Mullin denies, insisting the crash was caused by external liquidations.
This week has seen Mantra’s OM token, co-founder and CEO John Patrick Mullin do a lot of damage control after a dramatic 90% crash in the token’s value. After Mantra’s co-founder struggles of dealing with social media backlash, the damage control project is still underway, and it’s nowhere near being convincing.
To substantiate the case, co-founder and CEO John Patrick Mullin has pledged to burn all of his personal “Team and Core Contributor” token allocations in an effort to regain investor confidence.
Mullin made the announcement on Tuesday via the X platform, stating that his allocated tokens, which are set to begin vesting in April 2027, will be permanently burned.
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,
Mullin wrote.
In order to regain its lost glory, the CEO pledged to come foward with a broader burn program that will include other portions of the OM token supply.
Although the exact scale of the burn is still being finalized, Mullin emphasized his desire to make it “as large as [he] can possibly make it.” He also noted that other team members have voiced support for the initiative.
The move follows a catastrophic collapse of the OM token, which plummeted from $6 to under $0.40 in just an hour on Sunday. Prior to the crash, OM was the 23rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap, briefly outperforming major tokens like Litecoin and Polkadot. Following the crash, its market cap has dropped to just $740 million, pushing it out of the top 100.
Mantra, a layer-1 blockchain focused on the tokenization of real-world assets and regulatory compliance, has partnerships with high-profile entities like Google Cloud and Dubai’s DAMAC Group. The project’s team has denied any involvement in the token’s sudden drop, attributing the decline to “reckless liquidations” on centralized exchanges.
In a subsequent interview with crypto investigator Coffeezilla, Mullin reiterated that the Mantra team neither sold nor was liquidated during the crash.
We don’t have leverage positions on exchanges. We don’t do that,
he said.
However, questions have arisen over Mantra’s use of over-the-counter (OTC) deals, with critics alleging price manipulation.
Mullin confirmed that Mantra sold $20–30 million worth of OM OTC to unnamed entities and used a portion of those proceeds—around $5–10 million for token buybacks through market makers. While critics like Coffeezilla labeled this as price manipulation, Mullin defended the actions as necessary to maintain healthy market conditions in a low-liquidity environment.
“This is not a buyback to pump,” Mullin clarified. “It’s more of a way to support the market during volatility.”
Meanwhile as Mantra’s future hangs on the balance, OM is trading on the green, as it trades with $0.8026 after a 4.88% surge in the past 24 hours.