The truth is, watching a crypto project you’d invested in go through a 90% nosedive stings. It’s the equivalent of watching your favorite sports team get totally blown up. It stings. And for most lucky MANTRA ($OM) investors, that’s just what happened on April 13th. The question isn’t what happened so much as what can be done. Here comes the happy part. Can the community, the heart and soul of any decentralized project, save MANTRA from going over the edge?
Community's Power Or Just Wishful Thinking?
Panic is the first reaction to a crash like this. Everyone else starts to sell, realizing losses, and the cycle of doom continues. In the midst of all that chaos, there brews a storm of solidarity and collective action. We've seen it before. Now imagine those same local communities banding together to prevent a favorite independent bookstore from going out of business. They pool resources, organize events, and remind everyone why that bookstore matters.
Can the MANTRA community do the same? Founder John Patrick Mullin’s burn-the-tokens plan — beginning with his own 150 million OM — is a good start. A symbolic gesture? Maybe. But symbols matter. It’s not just a signal, it’s a declaration that someone is in the fight. The supply reduction, a cut from 1.82 billion to 1.67 billion is significant. Watching staked tokens plummet along with it, from a high of 571 million down to just above 421 million, indicates that people are losing hope.
Here’s the thing: numbers don’t tell the whole story. They don’t capture the passion of the developers still building, the investors who see long-term potential, the everyday users who believe in MANTRA's vision. These are the missed calls, the people whose voices are all too easy to ignore when the dashboards are blaring scarlet.
The charges raised by Bitget’s CEO, Gracy Chen, against centralized token concentration, lack of governance, and cascading liquidations are no joke. They do indicate fatal flaws at the very least crying out to be addressed. Burning tokens just isn’t going to cut it. You need to go to the root causes of what made that crash happen in the first place.
Governance, Trust, And The $LUNA Echo
Let's address the elephant in the room: the comparisons to the Terra Luna Classic collapse. No one wants to hear that their investment is being compared to the crypto version of Lehman Brothers. It’s a scary truth to accept. Ignoring the similarities would be foolish. Both featured dramatic price collapses, dubious tokenomics and last-ditch efforts to save face.
In order to not suffer the same fate, MANTRA requires a radical transparency and a desire to see true decentralized governance come into play. Most importantly, it should allow the flexibility of local decision making, not prescribe what all the communities should do from above. Because what happens when trust is eroded?
Right now, $OM is trading around $0.508. A meager 4% bump on the day of the report is not exactly anything to pop champagne over. And while Bitcoin's surge to $88.5K offers a glimmer of hope for the broader market, MANTRA's recovery requires more than just riding Bitcoin's coattails.
- Investors lose confidence
- Developers leave
- The project slowly fades into obscurity.
I am personally optimistic that MANTRA has the potential to change this, but it won’t be done on token burns alone. It takes more than just good intent — it takes a fundamental shift in how you run the project, and how you engage the community. Imagine, if you will, the early days of the internet, when open-source software was created by enthusiastic networks of developers. They weren’t in it for the money, they were in it to realize a collective dream of a more open and decentralized world.
Beyond Tokenomics: Building A Future Together
MANTRA could really use to draw on that same spirit. What if the community worked together to not just price action but actually build something of enduring value? Imagine if they instead used their joint resources to create truly groundbreaking applications that pushed the ecosystem forward and grew the user base dramatically.
Here's my call to action: get involved. Quit standing off to the side and observing. Become part of the MANTRA movement, bring your talents and creativity, and be part of a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable future. Of course, the future of MANTRA doesn’t rest with four people. Most importantly, it continues to prosper because of the remarkable, collaborative spirit of its colorful, dynamic community. Only time will tell, but as always, the people will decide. History will judge them on whether this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.
MANTRA needs to tap into that same spirit. What if, instead of focusing solely on price action, the community focused on building something truly valuable? What if they used their collective resources to develop innovative applications, expand the ecosystem, and attract new users?
Here's my call to action: get involved. Don't just sit on the sidelines and watch. Join the MANTRA community, contribute your skills and ideas, and help build a more resilient and sustainable future. Because in the end, the fate of MANTRA rests not in the hands of a few individuals, but in the collective power of its community. It's the people who will decide whether this is the beginning of the end, or the start of something new.
