MANTRA Chain pulled the plug on all transactions and stopped producing blocks after what it described only as an unspecified incident. The move sent its native OM token to an all-time low of $0.004126 as trading volume spiked nearly 600%.
The Layer 1 blockchain, built for real-world asset tokenization, froze the network late Thursday as a precaution while it dug into what happened. OM slid from $0.005060 to that record low around 11:00 pm UTC, according to CoinGecko, before clawing back to roughly $0.0044. Cointelegraph pegged the intraday drop at 18%. The Block caught a later snapshot and measured the 24-hour decline at 9.9%, landing at $0.004406. Trading volume surged to $24 million.
“We’re aware of an incident affecting MANTRA Chain and have halted the chain as a precaution while we investigate,” the MANTRA team wrote on X. “All endpoints and transactions are currently frozen.”
The team offered no root cause. No timeline for resolution either. MANTRA’s status page called it a full outage hitting public endpoints, validators, bridge migration operations, and MANTRA-managed Inter-Blockchain Communication relays. The network’s public RPC showed block 17,449,398, produced at 11:13 pm UTC, as the last one standing.
Exchanges reacted fast. Affected platforms froze OM deposits and withdrawals. The status page said engineering and security teams were working with external partners and had notified exchange and ecosystem partners to halt transactions until the issue clears. No word on when either service might resume. The team said it won’t restart the network until it’s confident the chain is safe.
What triggered the halt? Unclear. The nature of the incident stayed undisclosed at the time of reporting. MANTRA hasn’t said whether any assets were lost or at risk. Cointelegraph reached out to the MANTRA team for comment but heard nothing back by publication. The Block said it also tried.
This halt hits a chain already carrying serious baggage. Back in April 2025, MANTRA’s former OM token plunged more than 90% from about $6.30 to below $0.50. That wiped out more than $5 billion in market value in what The Block called a “$5 billion crash.” Founder John Patrick Mullin later promised to burn $82 million worth of his own OM tokens to rebuild trust.
The damage ran deeper than price charts. MANTRA cut staff in January 2026 after Mullin called 2025 the project’s most challenging year. By June, strategic backer Inveniam Capital Partners, which had put $20 million into the project in 2025, announced plans to acquire the platform. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. Neither report addresses whether this latest halt complicates that acquisition. Holders, as usual, are split.
MANTRA posted its first incident notice at 11:44 pm UTC Thursday, about half an hour after CoinGecko logged the token’s low. The project hasn’t clarified whether the price move came before or after the incident that triggered the halt, or whether the two are even connected.
