Price Plunge Precedes Network Halt

The native token of MANTRA plummeted 18.5% from its 24-hour high, establishing a new record low shortly before the MANTRA Chain ceased producing blocks. In response to an unexplained incident, the project’s team announced a precautionary halt of the network.

According to data from CoinGecko, MANTRA's price declined from $0.005060 to an all-time low of $0.004126 at approximately 11:00 pm UTC on Thursday. The token subsequently recovered to around $0.0044 but was still down by about 10% over a 24-hour period. Concurrently, trading volume surged by nearly 600% to reach $24 million.

MANTRA Team Investigates Incident

On Friday, the MANTRA project acknowledged it was “aware of an incident affecting MANTRA Chain” and had stopped the network as a precaution while it conducts an investigation. "We don’t have a root cause or timeline to share yet," the project’s statement read, confirming that all endpoints and transactions were frozen.

The network shutdown prevents any assets from being moved on the MANTRA Chain. This has prompted exchanges supporting the token to pause both deposits and withdrawals, with no timeline provided for when these services might resume.

Details on MANTRA’s status page categorized the event as a full outage. The disruption affects public endpoints, validators, bridge migration operations, and MANTRA-managed Inter-Blockchain Communication relays. The team has affirmed that it will not bring the network back online until it is confident that doing so is safe.

A look at the network’s public RPC shows that the latest block produced was 17,449,398, which was generated at 11:13 pm UTC on Thursday. The price low, as reported by CoinGecko, occurred around 11:10 pm. MANTRA released its first notice about the incident at 11:44 pm.

The project has not yet clarified whether the significant price movement was connected to the incident or if any user assets were lost or put at risk. Cointelegraph reached out to the MANTRA team for further details but had not received a reply by the time of publication.

A History of Challenges

This recent decline adds to a series of difficulties for the project. In April 2025, MANTRA experienced the collapse of MANTRA’s former OM token, which plunged over 90% from a value of about $6.30 to under $0.50, wiping out more than $5 billion in market capitalization.

More recently, Inveniam Capital Partners announced plans to acquire MANTRA in June, following a $20 million investment in the project in 2025. The acquisition news came after the project underwent January layoffs and restructuring. CEO John Patrick Mullin had previously described 2025 as the project’s "most challenging year."