MANTRA Chain Halts After Incident, OM Token Crashes to Record Low

MANTRA Chain stopped producing blocks overnight on Friday after an unexplained incident, and the OM token dropped 18.5% from its daily high to a record low within minutes. The project team paused the network as a precaution and has not yet named a cause for the outage.

What happened to the MANTRA network

MANTRA Chain is a Cosmos SDK-based blockchain that the project team markets as infrastructure for tokenizing real-world assets (RWA). The OM token is used to pay fees and for staking on the network, which is why it took the brunt of the fallout.

According to CoinGecko, OM fell from $0.00506 to a new low of $0.004126 around 11:00 pm UTC on Thursday. The price later recovered to about $0.0044, though the token stayed down roughly 10% over 24 hours. Trading volume jumped nearly 600% during that stretch, reaching $24 million.

The network's last block, number 17,449,398, was produced at 11:13 pm UTC on Thursday. Half an hour later, the MANTRA team posted its first notice about the incident. Around 11:10 pm, right as the price hit its lowest point, the network had effectively already stopped functioning.

How the team and exchanges responded

On Friday, developers confirmed they were "aware of an incident affecting MANTRA Chain" and halted the network to investigate. All endpoints and transactions are frozen. As a result, several exchanges listing OM paused deposits and withdrawals with no clear timeline for resuming service. For token holders, that means they currently cannot move funds to another platform or cash out into fiat. Freezing deposits and withdrawals during incidents like this is standard exchange practice meant to protect user funds while the cause remains unclear.

MANTRA has not clarified whether the price crash is connected to the technical outage or whether the two events, despite happening almost simultaneously, are unrelated. Cointelegraph reached out to the project for additional comment but had not received a response by publication time.

"We don't have a root cause or timeline to share yet."

- from an official statement by the MANTRA team, August 21, 2026

Inside the technical outage

The project's status page classified the event as a full outage. Several network components were hit at once:

• public RPC access points
• network validators
• bridge operations for asset migration
• MANTRA-managed cross-chain IBC relays

The IBC protocol handles data exchange between different Cosmos-based blockchains, while bridge operations let assets move from other networks onto MANTRA Chain and back. With all of these components down at once, users currently cannot process transactions within the network or move assets outside of it.

The team said it will not restart the network until it is confident it is safe. The company has given no specific recovery timeline, and representatives of crypto exchanges that support OM have not received any estimated schedule from the project so far. Similar emergency shutdowns have hit the industry before: this summer, the Ravencoin network rolled back blocks after a critical consensus exploit.

For a blockchain that positions itself as a platform for tokenizing real-world assets, an incident like this carries extra weight. Traditional finance firms considering issuing tokenized instruments typically expect predictable infrastructure without sudden shutdowns. Every new outage makes it harder for the MANTRA team to negotiate with such partners.

MANTRA's history of trouble

This is not the token's first major decline. In April 2025, OM crashed more than 90%, falling from $6.30 to below $0.50, wiping out over $5 billion in market value within hours. That earlier crash was never fully explained publicly by the team. Measured against the pre-crash price of $6.30, the token is now worth less than 0.1% of that level, even after its partial recovery from last year's collapse.

In June, Inveniam Capital Partners announced plans to acquire MANTRA after investing $20 million in the project back in 2025. That deal followed January layoffs and a restructuring of the team. Founder John Patrick Mullin publicly called 2025 the toughest year in MANTRA's history at the time.

This latest incident lands just as the company is negotiating a deal with a new investor, adding uncertainty ahead of a possible acquisition. For a prospective buyer, a sudden, unexplained network halt becomes an extra risk factor when pricing the deal.

For now, the market can only watch how the situation unfolds. Until MANTRA publishes the results of its investigation, neither token holders nor partner exchanges will get an answer to the central question: whether user funds were ever at risk, or whether this was purely a technical failure with no impact on assets. The project's history of an April crash and repeated staff restructuring makes this pause especially sensitive for anyone still holding OM.