How One Trader Caused MANTRA OM’s $5.5 Billion Crash

The recent OM collapse at MANTRA has left the community confused. In a series of instant drops, $5.5 billion was erased. According to several analyses, the incident was caused by one trader manipulating two exchanges.

This whole incident highlights the fragility of many token projects. Despite an ostensibly huge market cap, a comparatively tiny amount of liquidity triggered a complete collapse.

Exploring the OM Crash

When MANTRA’s OM token collapsed earlier this week, it left a huge number of unanswered questions. It sparked allegations of foul play, and rumors of insider activity have dogged the company since.

According to a new analysis, the initial trigger of the OM crash was a single trader:

“This was due to an entity(s) on Binance perpetuals market. That’s what triggered the entire cascade. The initial drop below $5 was triggered by a ~1 million USD short position being market sold. This caused over 5% of slippage in literal microseconds. That was the trigger. This seems intentional to me. They knew what they were doing,” he stated.

After triggering this initial anomaly, this OM trader continued dumping short positions at five-second intervals, which powered the overall crash. As these continual dumps continued on Binance, the OKX spot market saw a discount of nearly 20%.

The Seller Finds Exit Liquidity

This strange behavior on OKX was caused by a massive whale. A limit sell order allows the seller to specify the minimum price they are willing to sell a crypto asset for. The order will only execute if the market price reaches or exceeds the limit price. Until then, the order remains open in the order book.

This person single-handedly kept the price fixed on OKX for over a minute, causing market makers and arbitrage bots to buy the assets despite panic selling in the broader market. By this method, the perpetrator was able to dump OM tokens while the crash was underway.

The issue, then, is not that OM fell because of a nefarious actor trying to engineer a crash. Instead, the problem is that a single entity could manipulate the markets so thoroughly.

For an attack like this to work, OM’s ostensible market cap had to be substantially more fragile than anticipated.

In other words, even though OM’s market cap was theoretically very high, it took a comparatively small investment to crash the RWA token like a house of cards. Some have even speculated that this trader wasn’t even trying to cause a crisis.

Rather, they may have been investors who were forced to sell due to loan terms or risk limits. Some slight manipulation could’ve led to a larger catastrophe.