Key Takeaways
Following a steep 90% crash in the OM token’s price, MANTRA founder and CEO John Patrick Mullin has announced that he will burn his personal token allocation, 150 million OM, in a bid to restore confidence in the project.
The move is part of a broader effort to reduce the token’s supply and rebuild trust with the community. The MANTRA team has begun the process of unstaking these tokens, originally set aside during the network’s genesis to secure the chain.
MANTRA says it’s also in discussions with major ecosystem partners to coordinate a second 150 million OM token burn, potentially bringing the total to 300 million tokens.
These tokens were originally staked in October 2024 by the founding team and early contributors to bootstrap network security.
Now, nearly six months later, those same allocations are under scrutiny after community backlash and a wave of criticism over perceived insider token movements ahead of the crash.
In its public announcement, the team framed the burn as a “commitment made to the community” and a signal of their focus on building a transparent and accessible tokenized finance platform.
Tensions rose further after Mullin appeared in a video with YouTuber and investigator Coffeezilla, where he admitted to “pumping” the OM token price before its collapse.
While MANTRA attributed the crash to “reckless liquidity” by centralized exchanges, on-chain activity revealed that team allocations were adjusted and sold shortly before the plunge.
Beyond reputational damage control, the burn also has implications for OM holders.
The removal of 150 million OM tokens from circulation is expected to increase staking yields by lowering the bonded ratio from 31.47% to 25.30%.
According to the team, the total token supply will shrink from 1.82 billion to 1.67 billion OM, while staked tokens drop from 571.8 million to 421.8 million OM.
In the wake of the crash and the CEO’s controversial interview, trust in the MANTRA ecosystem has taken a major hit.
Accusations of a “soft rug” continue to circulate among critics. Now, with millions of tokens headed for the burn wallet, the team is betting on transparency and tokenomics to salvage its standing.