MANTRA halts its blockchain, freezing OM across global exchanges

MANTRA Chain temporarily halted network operations on Thursday as a precautionary measure following an undisclosed incident. It is freezing all public endpoints and on-chain transactions. As all the validators are currently paused, all transfers of its native token, OM, are completely disabled.

Consequently, major South Korean and international cryptocurrency exchanges have suspended OM deposits and withdrawals. While spot trading remains active on these centralized platforms, users cannot move their assets on-chain or withdraw funds until the core team and security partners conclude their investigation and safely restart the network.

For a sector that invested much of 2025 mulling over whether real-world asset tokens had been mistakenly vilified, the outage brings about an unwelcome query into the durability of OM’s infrastructure. Now, the market cap of the token is currently pegged at roughly $25 million after the losses of last year, meaning the financial impact is quite insignificant. However, the reputation loss may be quite tricky to handle as the OM is the same asset that plummeted by over 98% in one April session in 2025, causing a dip in the confidence of many people in the RWA market.

A precautionary freeze with no clock on it

According to the status page of MANTRA, their team of engineers and security specialists has stopped the chain after realizing there has been an incident, and they are looking into it together with partners. The chain cannot restart until the team is sure it is safe to do so, and until then, no transactions can be executed and OM balances are frozen in place.

The team has also alerted users about a common secondary risk during downtime, namely that of scammers. They told holders that they should use only official channels and avoid anyone reaching out to them offering to help retrieve their funds.

What is behind the events still remains a mystery. The company has not indicated what the reason behind the incident is, whether any sort of hack has taken place, or whether user funds are at risk.

Upbit and Bithumb pull OM off the rails

The fallout reached South Korea quickly, where OM has an active trading base. Upbit, one of the country’s largest exchanges, suspended OM deposits and withdrawals because of the network issue, according to Bitcoinworld. Bithumb followed with its own suspension for the same reason.

According to MANTRA, it has made the relevant notifications to exchanges and ecosystem partners; other than that, deposits and withdrawals on the impacted exchanges have been suspended until the chain restarts trading.

But spot trading may carry on. According to Bitcoinworld, users are still able to buy and sell OM via Upbit, even though transfers have been disabled. That makes for an interesting market, where prices can fluctuate, but traders cannot add new OM or withdraw the one they have.

A live order book that is out of sync with unusable settlement channels creates less liquidity in the market, making it more susceptible to major price fluctuations. The situation reminds one of the situation prior to the last significant crash of OM.

Why a small token still worries the RWA trade

OM is now a fraction of its former size, which makes the timing especially awkward for MANTRA. The chain’s transparency report put OM at about $0.0054 and a $29.9 million market cap in early August, with 5.53 billion tokens circulating. At its 2024 peak, the token was worth as much as $6 billion, according to earlier Cryptopolitan reporting.

After the April 2025 crash, CEO John Patrick Mullin said: “We have determined that the OM market movements were triggered by reckless forced closures initiated by centralized exchanges on OM account holders.”

Since that time, MANTRA has been working on the restoration of its institutional position. In June, Inveniam Capital Partners agreed to purchase MANTRA and its associated companies, with the deal anticipated to be completed in the third quarter of 2026 and MANTRA is also in possession of the digital-asset license from Dubai’s VARA.

An unexplained chain halt cuts directly against that recovery story. For the wider RWA market, the episode is a reminder that regulatory positioning and institutional backing do not eliminate infrastructure risk. A compliance-focused Layer 1 can still go dark without warning, and OM’s comeback still depends on a network investors have already seen tested before.

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