Mantra’s CEO aims to earn community confidence by permanently removing the team’s tokens from circulation.
To restore faith after OM’s downfall, CEO John Mullin says he will eliminate the 300 million OM tokens reserved for the team.
After the unexpected drop in the Mantra (OM) token on April 13, CEO John Mullin revealed plans to burn all tokens held by his team to win back the community’s support.
“I’m planning to burn all of my team tokens and when we turn it around the community and investors can decide if I have earned it back,” Mullin posted to X on April 16.
The team and core contributors at Mantra received 300 million OM tokens, which account for 16.88% of the total supply of approximately 1.78 billion.
According to the April 8 blog post, the tokens remain inaccessible and were meant to unlock in multiple phases from April 2027 to October 2029.
CoinGecko data shows that OM’s sharp fall on April 13—from $6.30 to $0.52—slashed its market value by over $5.5 billion, dropping the team’s token worth from $1.89 billion to about $236 million, with OM now trading around $0.78.
The community responded to Mullin’s vow with mixed reactions—some welcomed it, while others worried it might signal reduced long-term investment in the real-world asset tokenization platform.
“This would be a mistake. We want teams that are highly incentivized. Burning the incentive may seem like a good gesture but it will hurt the team motivation long term,” said Crypto Banter founder Ran Neuner.
The community could decide how to burn the 300 million tokens through a decentralized vote, according to Mullin.
To ensure openness with the community, Mullin promised to publish a detailed post-mortem on the situation.
Mullin outlined his plan on April 14 to leverage the $109 million in the Mantra Ecosystem Fund for token buybacks and burns, targeting the stabilization of OM’s price, which had fallen from $6.30 to as low as $0.52.
Mullin’s company dismissed the rumors that it controls 90% of OM’s token supply and is involved in market manipulation or insider trading.
Mantra contends that “reckless liquidations“ caused OM’s price to plummet and clarifies that the incident did not tie to any team-driven actions.
Just prior to the OM token collapse, platforms like OKX and Binance saw a noticeable increase in trading activity.
OKX and Binance maintained they did not cause the collapse, instead linking it to the tokenomics revisions in October and the unusual volatility that sparked high-volume liquidations on April 13.
