MANTRA founder will burn $82 million worth of his OM tokens to 'rebuild trust' following $5 billion crash

The founder and CEO of real-world asset-focused Layer 1 blockchain MANTRA, John Patrick Mullin, said he plans to burn his allocation of 150 million of the network's OM tokens in an effort to "rebuild trust" and demonstrate an "unwavering focus" to build the network.

MANTRA also said it is in "ongoing conversations with key ecosystem partners" to increase the number of burned tokens to 300 million, about 16.5% of the network's supply of 1.8 billion. "This strategic burn will lower the bonded ratio from 31.47% to 25.30%, resulting in an increase in staking APR," MANTRA said .

The announcement comes just over a week after the OM token crashed dramatically on April 13, dropping over 90% in price in just hours and wiping out over $5 billion in market capitalization. The MANTRA team said "reckless liquidations" were to blame, and its investor, Laser Digital, denied any role in the crash.

"There were no $OM sales by the MANTRA team during this period of market distress," Mullin wrote on X . "We are confident that further information from our centralized exchange partners will provide more clarity on these events."

An X poll published by Mullin, asking his followers to weigh in on the plan to burn his tokens, saw over 81% support for burning the tokens immediately, out of over 8,000 votes.

The tokens will take until April 29 to unstake, MANTRA said, at which point the tokens will be transferred to the network's burn address. The price of OM rose slightly following the news, before falling again; it is currently down 2.7% in the past 24 hours, according to The Block's MANTRA Price page .