It started with a tweet. And, like most crypto catastrophes, it ended with billions wiped out and a founder claiming he did nothing wrong as his token spiraled 90% in spectacular fashion.
Hedgeye digital assets analyst Ishmael Asad tried to warn Mantra’s co-founder. He was laughed at, but just three days later, $5 billion on paper was evaporated. After Mantra’s collapse this week, the analyst who warned a crash was coming tells Coinage he doesn’t want to take a victory lap.
“It feels good to be right and to … have made some level of difference out there,” Asad said. “So I feel good about being right. I can’t say I feel good about everyone losing money and having another billion dollar crypto collapse here in 2025, but we’ll get there. Someday. Hopefully.”
As Coinage covered in our interview with Mantra co-founder JP Mullin, a liquidation event triggered a massive re-pricing of the once high-flying real-world asset project. What had been one of 2024’s biggest success stories quickly shifted into 2025’s biggest failure as its OM token tanked on Sunday. Asad had caught some of the warning signs ahead of the collapse hitting, as he tracked a growing supply of tokens.
“I was definitely caught off guard by the hahas in front of all of his responses and kind of just the sheer arrogance,” Asad said, referring to Mantra co-founder JP Mullin’s reaction on X. “I was also caught off guard by not just JP Mullin’s responses, but the community who also came at me… and told me, ‘Yeah, thanks. But we’ve done the research already.’”
As OM plummeted from about $8 to under $1 in the span of a weekend — roughly a $5 billion drawdown in paper value — it wasn’t just Asad’s timeline that looked eerily prescient. His skepticism was grounded in data going back months.
“We first started to realize it back in November,” he explained. “We looked at tokenomics and the fundamentals and said, you know, this doesn’t justify this current valuation.”
But that warning didn’t go over well either. “They were definitely not receptive to any sort of differing opinions,” he said. “I think they called me a witch.”
At the core of Asad’s thesis was a quietly dangerous detail: A doubling of OM’s supply when Mantra migrated from Ethereum to its own L1.
“They literally doubled the supply,” Asad said. “And out of that new supply… they kept a large chunk of that as well for core contributors, seed funding and ecosystem development grants.”
It didn’t help that hype around partnerships in Dubai created the illusion of traction. “Meanwhile, there were no actual assets tokenized on Mantra,” Asad said. “You can look at the Block Explorers, you can look at DeFi Llama. The total value locked on Mantra is like 4 million. And that’s just a decentralized exchange. That’s not tokenization.”