UAE regulated Mantra Chain lets go of talent as it restructures

It seems that MANTRA Chain did not recover well from the tumultuous year it had in 2025, the fall of the OM Token brought MANTRA to its knees, despite all the efforts that were made by John Patrick Mullin Founder and CEO of MANTRA Chain to rectify the situation. While MANTRA Chain retains its license, and while no foul play was placed on the company as of yet, it has had to let go of a large number of employees and talents as it sets to restructure. Mullin will be carrying out an AMA with the community on X on Monday January 19th 2026.

Mantra Chain started strong as many others before and after them. It received $11 million in investments with UAE Shorooq partners as lead investor. It then received its license from Dubai’s VARA.

It reminds us of those who have fallen within the UAE over the years, most recently M2 crypto exchange, Venom, Hayvn, and many more.

The Historic crash of OM Token

In April 2025, The OM Token dropped from around $6 to $0.37 in a matter of hours, shedding $10 billion in less than 24 hours. At the time both investors, Shorooq and Laser Digital denied that they had sold their OM Tokens, while Mantra Chain CEO pointed fingers towards the crypto exchanges, including OKX when he shared his preliminary report.

MANTRA acknowledged that significant amounts of OM tokens were moved onto exchanges for use as collateral. Based on MANTRA’s review of independent observations (here and here) of the incident, it was evident that there were forced OM position closures during a period characterized by reduced market activity (around 02:00 am Monday HKT). These liquidations created excessive selling pressure on the OM token market.

In late 2024, Mantra had changed OM’s tokenomics by increasing its circulating supply and accelerating inflation. These moves introduced new risks that prompted trading platforms to adjust how they handled the token. Shortly after, large onchain transfers from major wallets began surfacing, raising questions about whether internal strategy or external reactions triggered what followed.

Meanwhile, blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain reported that 17 wallets deposited 43.6 million OM into centralized exchanges starting April 7, 2025. At the time, this amounted to $227 million and represented 4.5% of OM’s circulating supply. Two of these wallets, according to Arkham Intelligence tags cited by Lookonchain, were directly linked to Laser Digital—a strategic investor in Mantra.

Spot On Chain also identified 14.27 million OM deposited to OKX just three days before the crash. These wallets had acquired over 84 million OM in March, spending nearly $565 million. Following the collapse, their remaining holdings were worth only $62.2 million. As a result, these investors recorded a combined unrealized loss of over $400 million. Spot On Chain added that the entities may have hedged positions elsewhere, but their selloffs still contributed to the sudden price breakdown.

An investigation ensued. Until now, the results have never been made public. However during Token2049 in Dubai UAE, Mullin shared with Henri Arslanian how the company was rectifying the situation by improving governance, transparency, tokenomics and more.

Mantra onboarded new validators to improve decentralization and security including Binance, Nansen, and Inveniam among others. They also winded down internal validators to reduce concentration.

They announced the OM token buyback, one supported and funded by a group of our key investors and stakeholders, via a $25,000,000 (minimum) commitment. At the time 19.98 million $OM have been acquired.

They also secured a $20 million investment from Inveniam to scale institutional RWA tokenization globally (UAE, US), upgraded MANTRA Chain to support both EVM and CosmWasm smart contracts natively. This makes it one of the first Layer-1 blockchains built for Real World Assets (RWAs) to deliver true native multi-VM support, established MANTRA Chain as OM’s native foundation passed. What began as an ERC20 token on Ethereum will become a native asset with global reach – one anchored to infrastructure purpose-built for real world assets.

Mantra also listed on major exchanges since April 13 including Upbit and Bithumb. Mullin at the time noting that South Korean exchanges have no market makers and exhibit a tremendous amount of due diligence.

Trying to reposition Mantra Chain in 2025

After the OM Toke incident, Mantra Chain worked on several fronts to reposition itself. It signed several partnerships, Google Cloud, Dimitra, Inveniam, GoldSky, launched Birkken on Mantra and recently Squid, a leading cross-chain liquidity bridge and aggregator, has officially integrated with MANTRA Chain — unlocking fast, secure, and user-friendly interoperability across 100+ blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, Cosmos, and XRPL.

The company even recently launched a stablecoin Mantra USD for RWAs purchases and trading on their ecosystem.

But one of its former major clients UAE MAG real estate developer announced a $3 billion tokenization deal with MultiBank Group, a financial derivatives institution in UAE, dropping its previous agreement with Mantra Chain valued at $500 million.

Mantra Restructuring Announcement

This week of January 2026, The CEO of Mantra Chain once again came out with some difficult news, and announced the restructuring of the company, which implies a sizable reduction in the size of the team.

On LinkedIn he noted, “Today, I’m sharing one of the most difficult decisions we’ve had to make at MANTRA. After the most challenging year MANTRA has faced for a multitude of reasons, I’ve decided to restructure the company. This includes reducing our team size and parting ways with a number of talented colleagues. This was an incredibly challenging decision and something I’ve personally been grappling with for some time. I’ve truly tried everything in my power to avoid coming to this conclusion. As part of this strategic shift for MANTRA in 2026, we aim to be leaner overall, streamlining operations, focusing our resources, and committing to disciplined execution.”

In his LinkedIn post, he takes full accountability for the decisions and for the path that led the company here. ” I take full accountability for these decisions and for the path that led us here. I know this is an incredibly challenging situation, particularly for those directly impacted, for their families, and for everyone at MANTRA. I’m especially sorry to those leaving us…”

He recommended the employees being let go, calling them talented and dedicated and noted that if anyone was hiring to reach out.

In his final comments, he reiterated his belief in the company and the potential of MANTRA Chain, the RWA ecosystem. He stated, ” With laser focus and disciplined execution, we’ll emerge stronger, more resilient, and better positioned for success. We’ll share more on our streamlined priorities and operating rhythm in the coming weeks. For now, I want to reiterate my gratitude to everyone who’s helped get us this far.”

One will have to see if the restructuring is the end, or will it be the start for a bigger better chapter.

On X, replies varied between some considering the company as dead, others blaming Mullin, with him replying to all, saying ” It is definitely not dead, and I am not going anywhere” He promised to hold an AMA in the coming days.

Mantra Chain is in the ecosystem at the right time though, with tokenization of real world assets becoming the center of not only discussions but also implementations.