MANTRA Halts Chain After Cosmos EVM Module Incident; Token Slides to Fresh Record Low

MANTRA has paused its blockchain following an incident tied to its Cosmos EVM module, pushing its native token to a new all-time low on Aug. 21. The team said two wallet addresses were impacted, user funds were not exploited, and a patched release is undergoing testing ahead of a possible network restart later today. According to MANTRA, the chain was halted as a precaution while the incident was investigated, freezing endpoints and on-chain activity. Deposits and withdrawals involving MANTRA Chain were also temporarily disrupted. In a subsequent update, the project said the network would remain paused while developers prepared and tested a fix. Transactions, transfers, and staking were unavailable during the halt, though the team stressed that the pause itself did not compromise user funds. MANTRA later reported it had identified the root cause and contained the issue, saying it was isolated to the Cosmos EVM module and affected two wallet addresses before the threat was stopped. The team reiterated that "no user funds were exploited" and added it had taken a full network snapshot before beginning restart procedures. The patched v8.4.0 release is intended to address the underlying vulnerability and is being tested on the DuKong testnet. If testing completes without issues, MANTRA is aiming for a coordinated mainnet upgrade and restart later in the day. Validators have been instructed to keep mainnet nodes offline until an official restart announcement. The token, previously known as OM, now trades under the MANTRA ticker following a 1:4 non-dilutive redenomination and ticker change completed in March. Under the conversion, holders received four MANTRA tokens for each OM token, with no change to the overall value at the time of redenomination. Following the chain halt, the token dropped more than 18%, sliding from about $0.0050 to $0.0041 to mark a new all-time low. At the time of writing, it had recovered to around $0.0046, still roughly 82% below its March 4 all-time high of $0.02627. The latest disruption comes with the project still shadowed by OM's sharp selloff in 2025. OM fell from above $6 to below $1 in less than an hour on April 14, 2025, erasing about 90% of its market value and triggering more than $70 million in liquidations. CEO John Patrick Mullin said at the time that "reckless forced closures" by centralized exchanges were to blame. The aftermath extended into January 2026, when MANTRA announced layoffs across multiple teams. The company said aggressive expansion through 2024 and early 2025 left costs too high following a difficult market stretch and events surrounding the token's collapse. Mullin also committed to burning 300 million OM tokens after the April 2025 crash, with the burn completed later that month. MANTRA said a full postmortem will be released. For now, the network remains paused while patched software is tested, leaving users largely dependent on the team's ongoing updates.