Silent Mantra 🤫
“Repeat after me: ‘The price has collapsed’”
In this week’s edition of The Context, we talk about Mantra dumping most of its value, AWS grinding to a halt, and South Korea pulling the plug on exchanges.
[Mourning Meditation? 🙏]
OM, the token for the MANTRA blockchain, crashed from a market cap above $6B to below $1B within a few hours over the weekend.
What Media Said 🧑💻:
This brought back Terra vibes, said Shaurya Malwa (CoinDesk). Mantra, which “lets users tokenize real-world assets (RWAs) like real estate and commodities,” was up 400% since November despite little discussion about it in crypto corners. Now that the token has gone from over $6 to under 60 cents, chatter is picking up—and fingers are being pointed.
CEO John Patrick Mullin and Mantra’s investors say there was no insider selling. Instead, Mullin blamed an unnamed exchange for “massive forced liquidations,” wrote Zack Guzman (The Street). But Mantra works with market makers to enable trading OM on exchanges. “So, as is always the case with these collapses (like Terra's $40 billion collapse in 2022), the question becomes what did Mullin and the Mantra team know, and when?”
This was “self-inflicted,” claimed CoinMarketCap head of research Alice Liu (Forbes). “MANTRA’s team allegedly exercised extreme control over OM’s supply, with up to 90% of tokens…held in a single wallet.” In short: “OM’s liquidity was thin, ownership remained highly centralized, and insider exits were quietly accelerating, all setting the stage for the token’s eventual implosion.” Order books couldn’t handle the run on the token, triggering liquidations that lowered the price further.
PR Perspective 🔎:
The disconnect between the project's $6B pre-crash valuation and minimal on-chain activity ($4.2M in DeFi deposits) highlights how limited disclosure requirements allow perception to diverge dramatically from reality. The industry must recognize that sustainable growth requires genuine transparency, balanced token distribution, and valuations that align with actual value. Projects with concentrated ownership and manufactured market conditions risk not just their own collapse but further regulatory scrutiny of the entire space. For investors, this event reinforces the critical importance of scrutinizing tokenomics, team behavior, and onchain metrics rather than being swayed by price movement and marketing narratives alone.
[AWSnap]
An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage temporarily suspended withdrawals at crypto exchanges, including Binance and KuCoin.
What Media Said 🧑💻:
“AWS allows companies like crypto exchanges, streaming services and e-commerce websites to outsource their computing power needs to one of Amazon’s over 200 global data centers,” explained Catherine McGrath (Fortune). “These data centers house fleets of computer servers that manage, store, and process data on behalf of web-based companies.”
Big exchanges use it to handle lots of transactions, said Zoltan Vardai (Cointelegraph), but the “service disruption may highlight the need for more decentralized alternatives, eliminating single points of failure.”
PR Perspective 🔎:
The AWS network interruption exposes a fundamental contradiction in the cryptocurrency industry: despite championing decentralization, major exchanges like Binance and KuCoin remain critically dependent on centralized infrastructure. Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t go down, so there’s a broader expectation that businesses selling BTC and ETH shouldn’t go down either. That may not be realistic or even desirable, but there’s room for projects to position themselves as more connected to crypto’s ideological foundations.
[Killer (of) app? 🗡️]
South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), a regulator that prevents money laundering and terror financing, pushed the Apple Store to make 14 crypto apps unavailable in the country.
What Media Said 🧑💻:
This is part of a “crackdown on unregistered foreign operators,” explained Callan Quinn (Decrypt). If you have a Korean-language website, market to Koreans, or accept payments in won, you probably have to register with the FIU to do business in Korea. KuCoin told Decrypt it “will fully cooperate with any regulatory requirements.”
“Meanwhile, local banks and crypto exchanges are preparing to serve institutional clients as regulators begin to ease restrictions on corporate investment in crypto assets,” noted Timmy Shen (The Block).
PR Perspective 🔎:
As builders, founders, and investors gather in Seoul this week for BUIDL Asia to celebrate innovation and progress in the web3 space, South Korea’s regulatory stance paints a contrasting picture. Removing unregistered crypto exchange apps from app stores shows that, however bullish the sentiment is on the surface, the country is maintaining tight control with regulations.
[Tweet of The Week]
Credit: @thespacecatjr
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The usual disclaimer: This newsletter collates the main themes and headlines of the week in DeFi/crypto/metaverse/Web3/NFT land and tries to provide unbiased context. It's aimed at anyone who wants to keep an eye on the space. It's put together by a team at YAP and doesn't contain any promotion of our clients (if one is mentioned, we'll flag that).
The team: Founder Samantha Yap and consulting editor Jeff Benson, Andrew Wickerson, Nathalie Larrea, Meghna Dembla, Samvidha Sharma, Trisha Goswami and Shajar Qureshi. Your feedback is, as always, welcome. Ping us at thecontext@yapglobal.com. Old newsletters can be found here.
This newsletter is prepared by YAP Global, an international PR Consultancy focusing on helping cryptocurrency, Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and brands through impactful storytelling. Find out more about us here.