OM My Goodness! Mantra’s TVL Soars While OM Tanks 🚀📉

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In a twist that would make even the most seasoned crypto enthusiast raise an eyebrow, Mantra’s RWA blockchain protocol saw its total-value-locked (TVL) hit a yearly high, all while OM’s price decided to take a nosedive of 90%. 🎢

Mantra TVL Surges 500% Following OM’s Crash

As of April 15, Mantra’s TVL (in OM terms) leapt to 4.21 million OM (~$3.24 million), a staggering 500% increase from just two days prior, according to the ever-reliable DefiLlama. 📊

Curiously, this TVL rise coincided with a dramatic collapse in OM prices, which plummeted over 90% during the weekend. The Mantra team, ever the optimists, blamed the sell-off on “reckless forced liquidations” initiated by centralized exchanges. 🏦

A rising TVL usually means that users are locking more tokens into a protocol’s smart contracts via staking, liquidity pools, lending, or farming for yield or network participation. 🌾

Analyst DOM spotted “aggressive buying” on crypto exchanges during the 90% OM price crash on April 13, amounting to $35 million worth of OM purchases when “the [Mantra] collapse was happening.” 🕵️‍♂️

Despite the 90% price crash, the simultaneous TVL spike and “aggressive buying” suggest that certain participants saw the collapse as a buying opportunity. 🛒

The fact that millions of dollars were deployed while the crash unfolded points to tactical accumulation, possibly by whales, insiders, or opportunistic speculators betting on a rebound or farming incentives. 🐋

As of April 15, OM’s price was trading for as high as $0.99, up around 170% from the weekend lows. 📈

97% of Mantra TVL is One DApp

Increases in Mantra’s TVL come with their own set of red flags. 🚩

For instance, around 97% of Mantra’s TVL growth came from Mantra Swap, the protocol’s native decentralized exchange. Its automated market-making pools accounted for 4.11 million OM in TVL, making it the primary driver behind the sharp uptick. 🏎️

A more decentralized ecosystem would have a greater capital distribution with multiple liquidity sources across lending markets, staking platforms, derivatives, etc. 🌐

Additionally, Mantra’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $1.88 billion as of April 15 dwarfs the total value locked (TVL) of $3.24 million, a glaring disconnect that could signal potential overvaluation. 🐘

With only 0.17% of its theoretical value actively deployed in its ecosystem, the protocol shows low capital efficiency and limited real-world usage. 🏚️

This imbalance suggests the market cap is likely driven more by speculation than adoption, and with a large portion of tokens likely still locked, there’s a high risk of future dilution as vested tokens are unlocked. 🔓

Analyst JamesBitunix posed Mantra’s FDV as a huge risk to OM dip buyers, saying:

“A lot of traders jumped in at this ‘bottom’ — both on spot and with leverage. Personally, I’d trigger another correction — preferably a sweep of the lows followed by a quick bounce.”

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2025-04-15 20:57