After Mantra’s OM token collapsed 90%, many analysts started pointing to insider selling. The latest move by Mantra DAO amplified these concerns.
Mantra (OM) is moving more tokens to exchange wallets, prompting concerns over insider selling. On Monday, April 14, Mantra DAO—the organization behind the RWA-focused project—moved another $26.96 million in OM tokens to a Binance wallet.
The move followed a 90% drop in Mantra’s price, from the day’s high of $6.28 to its current price of $0.7192. The crash, which wiped out over $5 billion in market cap, was blamed by several analysts on insider selling.
Notably, the Mantra team controls 90% of the OM token supply. In this context, the transfer of Mantra DAO funds prompted further concerns of insider selling.
Mantra CEO claims team did not dump tokens
In response to the price crash, Mantra’s CEO JP Mullin claimed that the sell-off was not due to any token sales by the team or investors. Instead, he blamed forced liquidations—triggered by centralized exchanges—for the collapse.
He is contradicted by several independent analysts who tracked token movements on-chain. For instance, crypto analyst Max Brown highlighted that Mantra had moved 3.9 million OM tokens to OKX just ahead of the price crash.
It’s important to note that once tokens are moved to centralized exchanges, their activity can’t be easily tracked on-chain. For this reason, independent analysts cannot definitively prove whether a sale did or did not occur. However, exchanges themselves can investigate these movements—and according to major CEXs, investigations are ongoing.
Binance has corroborated the CEO’s explanation. The exchange claimed that its initial findings suggest that the crash is likely due to cross-exchange liquidations. On the other hand, OKX pointed to “major changes” to OM’s tokenomics, as well as several on-chain addresses depositing tokens to centralized exchanges.
