MANTRA: Token OM plunge triggered by reckless liquidation, unrelated to the project itself

The OM token of MANTRA, the RWA-focused Layer 1 blockchain project, fell about 10% between 01:20 and 02:20 am Beijing time today, before suddenly plummeting from $5.21 at the time to about $0.50 now (as of press time), a drop of 90% in just 90 minutes. Before the project's public-facing Telegram group became inaccessible, community leader Dustin McDaniel played down the team's allegations of a sell-off, saying it was not yet known. At 04:51 am, MANTRA's X account was updated to say that the slump was triggered by a reckless liquidation and had nothing to do with the project itself. Co-founder John Patrick Mullin mentioned that large OM investors were subject to massive forced liquidation at CEX and said it was being dealt with. Previously, MANTRA was accused of controlling a large proportion of the token's circulating supply and trying to manipulate the token price. Mullin responded: "The OM token has been in circulation since August 2020, longer than most skeptics have been in the crypto space."
Some investors pointed out that DeFiLlama data shows that the MANTRA protocol TVL is only about 13 million US dollars, while its token is fully diluted and valued at up to 9.50 billion US dollars, which may be a red flag. In addition, Insomniac, the head of governance at Castle Labs, found that three wallets recently transferred millions of OM tokens to OKX and Binance. One wallet received about 36 million OM tokens from Binance on March 21, and transferred about 4.30 million tokens to OKX on Saturday, suggesting a possible sell-off.