MANTRA Freezes Blockchain After Cosmos EVM Incident as Token Hits New Low

Validators have been instructed to keep their mainnet nodes offline until a restart is officially announced.

MANTRA has halted its blockchain after an incident affecting its Cosmos EVM module, sending its native token to a new all-time low on August 21.

The team says two wallet addresses were affected, no user funds were exploited, and a patched release is being tested before a possible network restart later today.

MANTRA Freezes Chain as It Tests a Fix

MANTRA initially said it had halted the chain as a precaution while investigating an incident, with all endpoints and transactions frozen. Deposits and withdrawals to and from MANTRA Chain were also temporarily affected.

A status update later said the network remained halted while developers prepared and tested a remediation. Transactions, transfers and staking operations were unavailable, although MANTRA said user funds were unaffected by the halt itself.

The team has since identified the root cause, saying the incident was isolated to the Cosmos EVM module and affected two wallet addresses before the threat was contained.

“No user funds were exploited,” the team repeated.

They also said they had taken a full network snapshot before beginning the restart process. Its patched v8.4.0 release addresses the underlying vulnerability and is being tested on the DuKong testnet, with the project targeting a coordinated mainnet upgrade and restart later in the day, provided testing finishes cleanly.

Validators have also been told to keep their mainnet nodes offline until the restart is announced.

The native token, formerly known as OM, now trades under the MANTRA ticker after the project completed a 1:4 non-dilutive redenomination and ticker change in March this year, meaning holders received four MANTRA tokens for each former OM token without changing their overall value at the time of conversion.

After the chain was halted, the token plunged more than 18%, going from about $0.0050 to $0.0041 to set a new all-time low.

However, at the time of writing it had managed to claw back some of that value and was changing hands near $0.0046, which still put MANTRA about 82% below its March 4 all-time high of $0.02627.

OM Collapse Still Hangs Over MANTRA

Recall that OM fell from above $6 to below $1 in less than an hour on April 14, 2025, wiping out roughly 90% of its market value, with liquidations exceeding $70 million.

At the time, CEO John Patrick Mullin blamed the collapse on what he described as “reckless forced closures” by centralized exchanges.

The fallout continued into January 2026, when MANTRA announced staff cuts across several teams. The company said its rapid expansion through 2024 and early 2025 had left its cost base too high after a difficult market period and the events surrounding the token’s collapse. Mullin also pledged to burn 300 million OM tokens after the April 2025 crash, with the burn completed later that month.

MANTRA says a full post-mortem will follow. For now, the chain remains paused while the patched software undergoes testing, leaving users with limited information beyond the team’s update.