John Mullin, CEO of Mantra, has announced his intention to burn the 300 million OM tokens allocated to the project’s core team in a bold move to restore community trust after the token’s unexpected crash on April 13.
“I’m planning to burn all of my team tokens. And if we manage to turn things around, the community and investors can decide whether I’ve earned them back,” Mullin posted on X on April 16.
According to a blog post on April 8, Mantra had previously set aside 300 million OM — approximately 16.88% of the total supply of nearly 1.78 billion — for its founding team and key contributors. These tokens are currently locked and were scheduled to vest gradually between April 2027 and October 2029.
At current market prices (around $0.78 per OM), the tokens are valued at roughly $236 million. However, before the collapse, they were worth as much as $1.89 billion when OM was trading at a high of $6.30. The token later plummeted to just $0.52, wiping out more than $5.5 billion in market value, according to CoinGecko data.
While many community members supported Mullin’s gesture, others expressed concern that the token burn could undermine the team’s long-term commitment to the project’s development.
“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 Ran Neuner, founder of Crypto Banter.
Mullin also suggested that a decentralized vote could be held to determine whether or not to proceed with the burn of the 300 million team tokens.
Mantra Begins Recovery Efforts
Mullin has pledged to publish a detailed post-mortem report explaining the causes of the token collapse, aiming to provide transparency for the community.
In an interview with Cointelegraph on April 14, Mullin outlined plans to use the $109 million Mantra Ecosystem Fund for potential token buybacks and burns in an effort to stabilize OM’s price, which had plunged from $6.30 to as low as $0.52.
Mantra strongly denied rumors that it holds 90% of OM’s token supply or was involved in insider trading and market manipulation.
According to Mantra, the price crash was triggered by “reckless liquidations” and had no connection to any internal actions by the team.
Crypto exchanges OKX and Binance, which saw significant OM trading activity just before the collapse, also denied any wrongdoing. They attributed the crash to changes made to OM’s tokenomics in October and to abnormal market volatility, which triggered high-volume liquidations across multiple platforms on April 13.
