MANTRA $OM Price Collapse | Cosmos ATOM & IBC Eureka Updates, dYdX Surge Program & More!

Yo, what a crazy week last week that ended off last night with an insane dump of 92% for the mantra OM coin that immediately caused huge speculation of what was wrong with the project. And in this video, I'm going to share what is now publicly available. But you can see that the price chart is absolutely destroyed within minutes. This thing went from $6 to below 50 cents as low as 37, 39 cents, which is crazy. My personal reaction, immediate reaction, because I saw the price in real time collapsing, was to stay as calm as possible. Obviously, this is an insane event that doesn't happen that often in crypto, but it does happen occasionally. And this industry is just insane. So first of all, reminds us always that any coin can go to zero like this at any instant, right? Which is why this has also been my tagline on Twitter for the past four or five years. So that's the first thing to remember. The second one is to also not get too emotional and jump to early conclusions, grave dance, or make up something just because that is maybe getting some clicks or some engagement or whatever. And we've seen a lot of that yesterday. Obviously, we're going to see a lot of that today as well. My personal intuition here is to wait for official communication so that we know what actually happened, what is the truth, or at least what is going to be the public statement and the plan forward, right? Obviously, now, a lot of trust has been broken, a lot of, you know, uncertainties that are along with what is going on with Mantra, with Om. They did come out quite fast. It did take a few hours. But obviously, when something like this happens, the first thing you do as a founder, as a project is to not just tweet about it. But in JP's case, the founder of Mantra, he was also on a trip. And in fact, he actually tweeted the day before yesterday, that he was going on a trip and he fears nothing more than long haul flights with no Wi-Fi. And I think he was on the way from Paris to Korea, and he's now in Korea. And whenever he woke up, he came out and said like, yo, I just woke up to the news, we're going to look into it. And we're going to share whatever we know. So my personal intuition, as I mentioned, and also my game plan for today and the next days, however long it's going to take, is to basically wait for an official post-mortem that is going to come, an official statement of what happened and why it happened, and who is also accountable or responsible for that massive sell-off. But basically, the state as of right now, as a JP came out addressing the community, saying that they have determined that the Om market movements were triggered by a reckless forced closure that was initiated by centralized exchanges on Om occult holders. What it means is someone got liquidated, forced liquidated, and that caused a huge death spiral for the Om price, which is crazy and also shows that there was apparently thin liquidity, at least no bidders left that could absorb that liquidation spiral. Another thing that JP highlighted was that it wasn't the team or advisors, the association or investors that were selling the token. So they're not responsible for that, which is something that the gravedancers on Twitter immediately jumped to. And we don't know, obviously, now we only have his word for that. They did post a full tokenomics breakdown with also wallets disclosed a couple of weeks ago or days ago, but we don't know 100% on whether or not early investors or team members even were responsible or partially selling their allocations. And also, if all these tokens are fully locked invested as it's been communicated right now, one of the main questions will also be how will Mantra partners react to this, right? Mantra has been the first blockchain to be VARA licensed here in the UAE and also signed this massive $1 billion contract with Damak. And we'll see how that will now play out. Is Damak still going to be standing with Mantra? Are they backing out of the deal? What clauses did this contract have? And what is going to be the next step here? Or are they now saying, this is too hot for us, we burned our hands with this price collapse, and we're out and we're exiting the contract. This is, I think, something that could have serious consequences for Mantra, if something like that would happen, because Damak is a huge, huge brand. And if they would be out, I think that would have a cascade effect also for other partners to then, you know, turn their backs on Mantra. And either partner with another crypto project or to just say, this crypto thing is too crazy for us, and we're not going to touch it ever again, right? Which to be honest, would be totally understandable as well. This is just what crypto is. It's a crazy, crazy industry. And we're still very, very early with some of these ideas. One of the allegations that has been made was that Laser Digital, which is an investor into OM, has basically sold over $250 million, at least that they would have sent those assets onto OKX last night or ahead of the crash, and that they were responsible for the price dump, which accounts to around 4.5% of the circulating supply of OM. But they also just came out and said that they are not responsible, and the wallets that were publicly shared are not theirs. That's exactly what I mean. Like, obviously, you can now make a big story about it. You can maybe get some engagement and some likes, you know, see some people doing that and, you know, quote tweeting, yikes here and yikes there. I think, wait for official communications. Let's see what was the actual cause, who was responsible, and if there will be an official post-mortem, which I believe is in the works. And we also now have Sharuk, who is one of the larger investors. I think they led one of their rounds coming out saying that they have not sold any tokens from Sharuk, and that there was no exploit by the Cascade Effect that happened during low liquidity hours, and they're long-term equity investors in Mantra, and their conviction hasn't changed. Because one thing that I know for myself, after knowing the Mantra team since 2018, I know some of their team members, and I, by the way, have never invested into Mantra. I was not offered an allocation. I don't have an OTC deal with them, or anything like that. The only OM exposure I have is by minting OMY NFTs, and I bought two or three on the market a couple of weeks ago, and through the airdrop that I'm receiving, which is also still vested, most of it. Only 10% were claimable last week, when the price was still at around $6. The only business exposure I have in that sense is through Stuxedo, because we're one of the largest validators on Mantra. But knowing the Mantra team since way before they even started Mantra, I know that they are definitely not scammers or criminals or rack pullers. Obviously, the Mantra price has been racked, right? This is, if you look at a chart, this is called a rack pretty much. But now there are different types of racks, right? There is team racks where the team just exits scams, and that is, in my view, at least not what happened here. There's other forms of racks. We've seen it with Polygon, for example, I think four or five years ago, where there was this liquidity flash crash as well. I think it was also in Binance or somewhere where the price just went down 70-80%. But then after that, they recovered. This is when Polygon was still called Mantic. They recovered, and then, you know, things went well for them eventually. And this is something that I'm more inclined to believe what is happening here with Mantra as well. But I obviously don't know if now is a good time to buy. I personally did buy a small bag at around $0.67 at this price, just like an hour before recording this video. Because I do believe in the team, but also I can be horribly wrong, and this thing will go to zero. But anyways, that is what I mean. Now, all these people are going to come out, and they're going to accuse each other, and there will be wild allegations. Some of them will go viral and have a lot of traction and likes and comments, and some will not. And that's okay. I think that's also part of the social media game and the fact that crypto is just this insane rollercoaster where prices go up and down like absolutely crazy. But yeah, again, I'll be cautious with taking conclusions early. What we do know is, you know, if you support Mantra, then I guess it's fine to come out and publicly support them like Mago is doing. He feels sorry for everyone affected by the Om's sell-off, but he will continue to support the community and will act as a resource to all Omis. And I think now it also really shows who is real, who truly believes in Mantra, in the team, in the project, and who is only there to farm Kaito Pines, right? Kaito Yaps, or whatever it's called. So yeah, I think that will be separating the real from the fake ones. And I think events like this, like adversity, tough times, you know, crazy screw-ups like this, whoever is responsible will really show who is real and who is not, and who believes and who doesn't, right? But again, we have to wait and see before jumping to any conclusions. My present conclusion right now is that I still give the benefit of the doubt to the Mantra team, to JP, for my personal backstory, knowing them for such a long time. I guess that's one thing, and the other thing I think, if you don't believe in it, is to just wait until there's official communications, and then assess from there and take your conclusions once we know what actually happened. Ren also coming out saying that JP was actually on a live space. This still happened, I think, last night or early this morning. And Ren also maintains it was not an exit scam. There's something else going on. And yeah, he will also keep them posted. I think Ren also has very close connections to JP. And JP, in fact, also showed up for his keynote. So props for that, to be honest. I think showing up on stage hours after such a huge event that everyone is talking about, where a lot of people are throwing a lot of shit on Twitter at him and at the team. And having the, you know, mentality and having the balls to show up on stage is a big one, I think. So yeah, that's on JP, and it also shows that he's not going anywhere, right? He's not going anywhere. And I think, yeah, he will share more as more information get public. There was no exploit a hack, no active selling from market makers or investors, apparently. That's one thing that we still have to kind of get 100% clarity. But JP said that on stage. And also large investors using OMS collateral were liquidated, which caused a drastic price action. That is apparently what happened. But whatever caused that, I think we still have to, whatever caused that liquidation, we still have to see. But yeah, postmortem coming soon. Now, switching gears, taking a bit of a breather, because this was a lot. And this is not a good way, I guess, to start a week. Same as we did back then with the Luna crash, with all other collapses that we had. The Matic crash last cycle as well. Yeah, this is crazy. But again, a reminder, any cryptocurrency can go to zero at any time just like that. And this is just the price we're paying for, you know, catching 40, 50, 100, 500 Xs eventually. This is the price we're paying. And that's what we sign up for, right? And I think crypto, investing in crypto, working in crypto is definitely not something if you have a thin skin. You really need to have a bulletproof mind. You need to have inner deep conviction. And you also need to understand that a 90 plus percent failure rate, as in betting on the wrong horses, betting on the wrong projects and coins at the wrong time and whatever, is very common in this industry, right? But the 10% or 5%, and I made this a couple of months ago, crypto is 95% pain and suffering, but 5% glory. And eventually, I, you know, I really believe that. And I think this is, again, what we sign up for. It's a high risk, risk on industry. Looking at the Cosmos ecosystem price movements, we're now seeing Mantra lost ranks, obviously, after this collapse of 88%. Now at 74 cents, we're seeing Kronos, the largest Cosmos chain, $2.4 billion FTV. The Cosmos carbon atom, which is what we are, we've been covering a lot here, especially now with the launch of IBC Eureka. The second largest chain, around $2 billion FTV. The Dan Celestia tier, $1.5, $2.51, crazy price. ASI, formerly known as Fetch, 50 cents roughly, say 18 cents, objective 8. But there is a lot of bullish fundamental stuff cooking. Obviously, I've been saying that for a very long time, but eventually, I think that, you know, fundamentals will be reflected on the charts. And right now, the fundamentals on the Cosmos hub and the Cosmos ecosystem as a whole are massively improving. With the most recent launch of IBC Eureka, that is not only going to establish a value accrual for Atom, but also that is reuniting the ecosystem. And IBC Eureka is now on the market since a couple of days and was integrated with a bunch of launch partners. Babylon being the most prominent one that also had its mainnet launch on the same day. Lombard, which is the largest Bitcoin liquid sticking provider that is also backed by Franklin Templeton. So Lombard is a huge project. Nillion for Privacy. CK Cloud as well. Well, decent launch partners. And they're also reiterating that whatever IBC Eureka became was built on the shoulders of giants, as they're saying here. The giants being Union, Polymer, Succinct, Landslide, Celestia, Strangelove, Toki, also Picasso Network and Informal Systems. And I think those teams really deserve a lot of credit for their early, you know, contributions to IBC and really for being IBC maxis. I know I did a lot of content with all of these teams pretty much. We had Jack on for a very long time, since four years, and he's been preaching IBC, IBC, IBC. If there was one thing that I could spend a billion dollars on to fund, then it would be IBC. That's what Jack said a couple of years ago. We had a lot of content with Celestia, obviously Picasso Network that now pivoted away entirely. Then Union, we had Carol on the channel here a couple of times, who was the ex-CTO at Picasso. So then went on to Start Union, which is also now about to launch and also integrated with Babylon the other day as well. So all these teams deserve a lot of credit for what they have been doing. But I think now it's looking into the future. And the future is basically the end of the bridging era. And the way Mark and Barry also speak about IBC V2 or IBC Eureka is that this is not a bridge, but this is a platform that eventually enables the seamless transfer of assets, products, ideas. And it doesn't really matter what users you're targeting, because eventually the whole philosophy of Cosmos is to rebuild the Internet, right? To build a better and more decentralized Internet and to not think in tribal camps, basically. And this is exactly what, you know, IBC Eureka envisions. And EVM or Ethereum was only the first step. There will be more connections to Ethereum L2s, to Solana eventually as well, the SVM, also to Ripple. Remember, there is this XRP ledger sidechain in the works that is currently on Testnet. So I think once that comes, it will also unlock XRP for an EVM compatible and IBC enabled environment. I think eventually also the Move VM will be compatible with IBC V2. And there are many bottom lines that you can take from here when it comes to the organizational structure of Cosmos, when it comes to, you know, interconnectivity within the ecosystem and driving synergies. But also one bottom line is that for the first time, the success of the Cosmos ecosystem, Cosmos Hub and Atom will be aligned. So there's also this flywheel of alignment and also economic alignment that will drive value for Atom. Max Betterhouse Berry also came out giving a TLDR saying that only Cosmos can build the new Internet because only Cosmos, like the old Internet, is built on an infinitely scalable communication protocol. A neutral and infinitely scalable TCP equivalent, which is IBC. Then also, at last, this protocol is expanding, which will create a new class of apps. And the Cosmos Hub, aka Atom, will be a platform for them, a true inter-chain service provider, interoperability hub, and also router for the inter-chain. In terms of numbers, IBC RECA did around $1 million in volume within the first hours. Range Security, Auspich Shala, they have initially shared that. They also have their dashboard where you can track IBC volumes and transfers. You can see that right here, all the recent transfers that have happened, also in which asset, and so on and so forth. In total, there's around 500 transactions right now that have been routing through IBCV2, at least as per this overview. Now, the next question is also, will this actually fix Atom economics? And will it create a meaningful value accrual system for Atom? And I think the first and most important thing is that at least now we have a product for the Cosmos Hub, a value offering, that positions the Cosmos Hub and Atom a lot better. And the way this works is that for every IBC or RECA transaction that routes through the hub, Atom gets burned. And this fee-burning mechanism went live around eight months ago, and in total, around $130,000 of Atom have been burned. You can see the burn address right here. I actually don't have 100% clarity on that precise wallet here. This is the one that Max shared also as the burn wallet that you can track here. But it basically showcases that 31,000 Atom would be available here to be spent. But if the private keys or seat to this wallet was burned forever, then I guess this counts as a burning address in that sense. Anyways, that's a different question. But 31,000 Atoms have been burned so far, according to this. And it will be interesting to see how that number grows. Obviously, I think right now it is still way too early to comment on the success of IBC Eureka. Obviously, there was an exciting launch campaign and also marketing around it. But now it will be up to use cases built on top or around IBC Eureka to drive the value flows with Eureka and with it also to burn more Atom. And I guess part of the game plan here is that in the next step, as fast as possible, a virtual machine, a smart contract framework, I personally think the most likely one will be the EVM, the Cosmos EVM, which was recently open sourced by FMOS. That this would be deployed on the Cosmos Hub so that the Cosmos Hub would have its own application layer, but also have strong economic relations to other chains. And using IBC Eureka drive massive volumes that would eventually also drive the burning of Atoms. Well, for more context around that, I strongly recommend you to watch this town hall that Nico, Mark and Barry hosted. Nico is the CMO at Interchain Labs, and they hosted this on Friday. They will also have some more content this week. So definitely something for you to listen into. One final thing I want to share about Atom before we switch over to Babylon and some ecosystem news is the bonnet ratio, because that has been going up and to the right ever since we bottomed out here in December of last year. But since then, we went up to now 58.53%. And I was a bit concerned when we went on this downtrend here, because that obviously means a lot of players have exited Atom. But now it's good to see that this is going up and to the right again. And with it also, the staking APR is coming down a bit, currently at around 17.6%. It went as high as almost 20% here in late December when the bonnet ratio was lower. Now switching over to Babylon, the Babylon Bitcoin staking protocol has now officially been activated on the brand new Babylon Genesis, aka Babylon Mainnet. And those of you that have staked their BTC in phase one of Babylon are asked to re-register their stakes. And I'll leave a link below this video on how to do it. So if you're a phase one Babylon staker, then there is some action required from your site. Well, with it also now we're seeing the Babylon ecosystem come to life. We also have now Tower, which is the first Babylon DEX that is now live on the Genesis network. And Tower is a new project of Valeo, previously founder of Quasar, which is being Sunset. And Tower is going to be a new DEX that is going to be fully Bitcoin aligned. As I mentioned in previous videos, I have revoked my advisory for Quasar. I already did it a couple of weeks ago, so I have no affiliation with NeoQuasar, no Tower at this point. But I definitely wish all the best to the Tower team. The same cons for Union. They have also now announced that they have connected and integrated with the Babylon Genesis network. And are going to support the broader Bitcoin ecosystem as it evolves. One of the things that will be interesting to see is now that IBC-Ureka is there and ICL is actively pushing the development for IBC v2. How it will affect the roadmap and trajectory for Union and Hyperlane or Axelar. But we'll definitely keep track of that and we'll see how they compete or even eventually might collaborate. Now, one of the projects that is one of the first customers of IBC-Ureka is DYDX. That when they migrated from Ethereum to Cosmos were kind of distancing themselves from the Cosmos brand. But now they are all in. And I think this is really cool to see that DYDX is now also onboarding users to Cosmos. And Chris, the CMO at DYDX Foundation, is also saying that he's impressed by the Cosmos community. That there's real momentum and energy building around IBC-Ureka. And if we stick around DYDX for a second, they have also now activated the DYDX search program. And with it also a restructuring in the reward distribution or allocations for DYDX revenue. Now 10% is going to the treasury. 25% to megavolt. 25% for buybacks, which is very interesting for the amount of revenue that DYDX is generating. And then 40% to staking rewards. And remember that this is going, this is all denominated in USDC and not in DYDX tokens. And remember that DYDX token has 0% inflation. So the 4% staking APR is fully from on-chain revenue and denominated again in USDC. $13 million is the incentive bucket for traders on DYDX. There's also a leaderboard. If you want to start trading on DYDX, you can just go on the top link on my video description here on CryptoSito. We are a VIP affiliate partner. So you'll save 50% of your fees and you also support the channel here with that. And you can now also earn extra rewards for trading on DYDX. And yeah, that is much appreciated if you use the referral link from the top video description. You can also now, long or short, Baby Babylon's token has also been listed on DYDX, which is good to see. And also Baby has been listed on Osmosis, which is more so a spot DEX. But also good to see that Baby has decentralized exchange liquidity on Cosmos DEXs. Now to wrap it up, ZON, the founder of Inicia, which is another multi-billion dollar chain that eventually is going to launch and is fully built on Cosmos and IBC aligned, is seeing tailwinds in Cosmos for the first time in a long time. I actually did an impressive panel at the last year's Shard Dubai Summit here in Dubai. ZON was quite bearish on Cosmos back then. And we had a nice back and forth on the panel and also afterwards in private discussions. But ZON is now saying, IBC Reca goes live, fast bridging of wrapped assets from outside Cosmos. The Cosmos hub, aka Atom, being used as a router for those wrapped assets, some possible path to Atom value. So the real question to sustain flows will be, are there use cases in Cosmos for these assets? And I think this brings us back to what I said earlier. There will be the Cosmos EVM eventually or some other sort of virtual machine, smart contract platform. So that the Cosmos hub would have its own DeFi or application environment. It can also be NFTs, can be something else as well. But I think this will drive a lot of, you know, flows and drive a lot of volumes and liquidity on the Cosmos hub itself, making it more competitive and robust. Then he's also highlighting the Neutron Mercury upgrade, which just happened, basically turning the Neutron chain into a sovereign layer one blockchain after it's been Atom secured. Now they have faster block times, no longer using the hub validators for security and still have an excellent team around Spade, Zion and also Nena that now joined the Neutron team. And Nena is also working with us as a contributor on Cosmoverse. And also the fact that Babylon launched, which is for me personally, also gives me a little bit of the Celestial launch vibes. It's a new paradigm for crypto. It's a new category that I have created and are dominating. So that's another big, big thing. Godspeed and good luck. I like that tweet, even though I think Zonny was a bit too early to jump to conclusions around, you know, this time around a year ago when he basically called death upon Atom and that only Initia would fix Cosmos or become what Cosmos was supposed to be. But a year later, I think Atom vibes have changed a lot. Cosmos ecosystem vibes has changed a lot. Initia is not yet live on mainnet, has been delayed for a long time. So we're still waiting for that. But I think it's good to see that there's more alignment and yeah, unity after all. You know, up until last evening, I was going to make today's video about Cosmoverse, breaking down the vision and also sharing that this week will be a big week for us because we are launching the early bird tickets and that will go live within the next 72 hours. We're still finalizing the ticketing platform. So once tickets are live, you can come here, click on tickets and you will get access to the ticketing platform. We're also adjusting this here on the website. For now, you can subscribe to our newsletter where we're sending out a notification in real time once the early bird tickets are live. Also note that we already have a link where you can book a room at the conference venue at the Le Meridion in Split, Croatia at 105 euros a night for a single room and 120 euros a night, which would mean 60 euros per night per person for a double room, which includes a rich breakfast buffet. I've been there for a whole week at the venue. The food is amazing. The place is amazing. It's a huge seaside resort, which has a lot of amenities and also a beach club and private beach access actually on two sides, but also which is something that is very rare for seaside resorts like this. They also have the perfect, you know, conference amenities and layout for ballrooms, breakout rooms and all this kind of thing. So you'll be able to book that right now as well. And considering that the early bird tickets are going to be super cheap and the hotel is super cheap. I think that from anywhere in Europe, you'll have the full three night customers experience for around 500 to 600 euros, which is unbeatable in our industry. Usually the ticket alone is five or 600 euros, at least for some even like 800 or a thousand euros per ticket for attending a conference. And you have to add travels, accommodation, also food and catering on top of that. And in this deal, most of this is covered because also, as always at customers, no one ever starved. We have a lot of great quality food. We have drinks. We have water throughout all conference days. There will be a lot of side events that will all be free to access. So you get the full customer's experience at a fraction of what other events charge you for just attending. And they will not serve you any food or anything like that. So check that out. Subscribe to your newsletter if you want to be informed once every bird tickets go live and you'll get the maximum value at the lowest rate possible. Now, that's all for today. Obviously, the main news for today is the mantra price crash, the entire collapse of the own price. So we're going to keep covering that story here on CryptoC2, also on Twitter, but also on the C2 Zone on Twitter and also on YouTube. And for our C2 Plus members, if you have questions, then do not hesitate to ask Sebmoz or myself in Discord. That's all. I'll see you very soon. Until then, stay safe and be good.