A Token's 90% Crash Shows Some Things Never Change in Crypto
Muyao Shen takes a look at the latest high-profile token crash, and decides that what's old is always new in crypto.
Mantra, a crypto project billed as a blockchain aiming to trade so-called real-world assets, saw the price of its token OM crash by 90% in just hours on April 13, erasing more than $5 billion in market value.
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Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
Agri-Tech Firm Dimitra Partners With MANTRA to Bring Cacao, Carbon Credits onto the Blockchain
Dimitra, a blockchain-based agricultural technology company, has partnered with Layer 1 blockchain platform MANTRA to bring real-world agricultural assets on-chain. Jon Trask, Dimitra's founder CEO, told CoinDesk at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas last week that the partnership aims to eventually bring a billion dollars worth of agricultural assets, starting with cacao in Brazil and carbon credits in Mexico, onto MANTRA's blockchain. Trask added that the two pilot projects with MANTRA are currently small in scale — in Brazil, only 25 of the 374 cocoa farmers in Brazil's so-called 'cocoa pole' in the southern region of Roraima are currently signed up to participate — but could be expanded 'indefinitely' with enough investor interest. Through the partnership, MANTRA holders will be able to invest directly in smallholder farmers, providing funding for a variety of regenerative agricultural projects in a way that is made traceable and verifiable by the blockchain. Trask estimated that investors could see between a 10-30% return on their investments annually, which he clarified was a a projected range based on preliminary modeling — with agriculture comes risks like pests and drought which could impact yield, he added. Trask said that Dimitra is still in the process of integrating the two pilot programs with MANTRA, but expects that holders of MANTRA's native OM token will be able to invest in the projects within the next couple of months. Dimitra's announcement comes a month after MANTRA took a beating. Its OM token plummeted 90% in a flash-crash in April. Since the crash, OM has hovered around $0.34 — a far cry from its height of $8.47 in February. Asked why Dimitra went forward on a partnership with MANTRA following the fallout, Trask said that the deal pre-dated the crash, but admitted it initially gave him pause. 'We made the deal many months ago,' Trask told CoinDesk. 'Then they had their crash, and we all took a pause to reassess to ensure we were making the best decisions for the long-term benefit of the community and projects amid a time of volatility.' But ultimately Trask decided to move forward with the partnership, telling CoinDesk that, when the dust settled, he still found the fundamental reasons for the partnership to hold true: MANTRA had a strong team, he said, the real-world asset (RWA) development was sound, and he was impressed by their virtual asset service provider (VASP) license, granted by Dubai's Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA), which it obtained earlier this year. MANTRA has done a number of RWA tokenization projects in the Middle East, including tokenizing $500 million worth of real estate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for a Dubai-based real estate group. 'Tokenizing agriculture isn't just about innovation, it's about finding solutions to real-world issues long associated with food supply — at scale — and for long-term impact,' said John Patrick Mullin, CEO of MANTRA, in a press release shared with CoinDesk. 'Dimitra is solving real-world problems, with a focus on traceability and transparency — and we're proud to help bring those to a wider audience. MANTRA Chain was built to support projects like these.' Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Yahoo
Movement Labs and Mantra Scandal Are Shaking up Crypto Market-Making
Two of the year's most chaotic token blowups — Movement Labs' MOVE scandal and the collapse of Mantra's OM — are sending shockwaves through crypto's market-making businesses."These scandals have definitely changed trust dynamics between market makers and project teams, where trust is no longer assumed—it's engineered," Zahreddine Touag, Head of Trading at Woorton, said over a Telegram message on Friday. "Market makers -- especially those providing balance sheet-intensive support -- will now insist on full disclosure of side agreements, token grants, and any preferential economic rights," Touag added. In both cases, rapid price crashes revealed hidden actors, questionable token unlocks, and alleged side agreements that blinded market participants, with OM falling more than 90% within hours late April on no apparent catalyst. Unlike traditional finance, where market makers provide orderly bid-ask spreads on regulated venues, crypto market makers often operate more like high-stakes trading desks. They're not just quoting prices; they're negotiating pre-launch token allocations, accepting lockups, structuring liquidity for centralized exchanges, and sometimes taking equity or advisory stakes. The result is a murky space where liquidity provision is entangled with private deals, tokenomics, and often, insider politics. A CoinDesk exposé in late April showed how some Movement Labs executives colluded with their own market maker to dump $38 million worth of MOVE in the open market. Now, some firms are questioning whether they've been too casual in trusting counterparties. How do you hedge a position when token unlock schedules are opaque? What happens when handshake deals quietly override DAO proposals? 'Our approach now includes more extensive preliminary discussions and educational sessions with project teams to ensure they thoroughly understand market-making mechanics,' Hong Kong-based Metalpha's market-making division told CoinDesk in an interview. 'Our deal structures have evolved to emphasize long-term strategic alignment over short-term performance metrics, incorporating specific safeguards against unethical behavior such as excessive token dumping and artificial trading volume," it said. Behind the scenes, conversations are intensifying. Deal terms are being scrutinized more carefully. Some liquidity desks are reevaluating how they underwrite token risk. "Recent developments have prompted a recalibration—not a reinvention—of how B2C2 assesses counterparty risk in our market-making," Dean Sovolos, Chief Legal Officer at B2C2, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. "Historically, when I first joined B2C2 in 2021, much of the crypto market operated on a blend of informal trust and aggressive risk appetite. That paradigm has shifted, especially of late. Post-Q1, B2C2 is seeing a marked pivot toward institutional-grade rigor: enhanced legal diligence, enforceable tokenomics terms, and clear contingency frameworks for breaches or deviations from disclosed unlock schedules," he said."The Movement and Mantra incidents didn't create new risks—they revealed how latent those risks remain in poorly governed token ecosystems. We're responding with stronger contract architecture, but also better integration between legal terms and technical enforcement mechanisms," Sovolos stated. Others are demanding stricter transparency — or walking away from murky projects altogether. 'Projects no longer accept prestigious reputations at face value, having witnessed how even established players can exploit shadow allocations or engage in detrimental token selling practices,' Metalpha's head of Web3 ecosystem Max Sun noted. 'The era of presumptive trust has concluded,' he claimed. Beneath the polished surface of token launch announcements and market-making agreements lies another layer of crypto finance — the secondary OTC market, where locked tokens quietly change hands well before vesting cliffs hit the public eye. These under-the-table deals, often struck between early backers, funds, and syndicates, are now distorting supply dynamics and skewing price discovery, some traders say. And for market makers tasked with providing orderly liquidity, they're becoming an increasingly opaque and dangerous variable. 'The secondary OTC market has changed the dynamics of the industry,' said Min Jung, analyst at Presto Research, which runs a market-making unit. 'If you look at tokens with suspicious price action — like $LAYER, $OM, $MOVE, and others — they're often the ones most actively traded on the secondary OTC market.' 'The entire supply and vesting schedule has become distorted because of these off-market deals, and for liquid funds, the real challenge is figuring out when supply is actually unlocking,' Jung added. In a market where price is fiction and supply is negotiated in back rooms, the real risk isn't volatility for traders — it is believing the float is what the whitepaper and founders say it is. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Bloomberg
13-05-2025
- Bloomberg
Hyperliquid Grows Into a Major Player in Crypto Derivatives
Muyao Shen reports on how Hyperliquid now ranks among the biggest venues for perpetual Bitcoin swaps, known as perps. Decentralized exchanges – the type of peer-to-peer trading platforms with few intermediaries – are finally getting closer to their dream of breaking into a market that's dominated by Binance and other centralized exchanges.
