MANTRA Halts Blockchain After Exploit as Token Slides to Record Low

MANTRA, an Ethereum Virtual Machine layer-1 blockchain built for real-world assets such as funds and bonds, halted its network following a software exploit, shortly after the project's token plunged 18.5% to a record low and block production stopped.

Chain Frozen While the Team Investigates

The token fell from $0.005060 to an all-time low of $0.004126 at roughly 11:10 p.m. UTC Thursday, according to CoinGecko. It later recovered to about $0.0044 but remained down approximately 10% over 24 hours, while trading volume surged nearly 600% to $24 million.

The network produced its last recorded block at about 11:13 p.m. UTC, minutes after the token touched its low. Roughly half an hour later, MANTRA announced the halt, saying all endpoints and transactions had been frozen as a precaution while it investigated. The outage affects the chain's public endpoints, validators, bridge operations, and the MANTRA-managed links used to communicate with other blockchains. Freezing a network mid-incident is unusual but not unprecedented: BNB Chain suspended briefly in October 2022 after an exploit minted roughly $570 million of BNB, and a coordinated halt remains one of the few emergency levers available to blockchain operators once an attack is underway.

Upstream Dependency Exploited

A later update said an attacker had exploited a vulnerability in an "upstream dependency" — software used by MANTRA Chain but developed outside the network itself. "We have identified the vulnerability and are proceeding to prepare a patched release," the team said. Third-party code has served as an attack vector in crypto before: in December 2024, malicious versions of a widely used Solana JavaScript library were published through a compromised developer account, draining wallets that interacted with them.

MANTRA's validators remain offline while developers prepare and test the fix, and restarting the blockchain will require coordination with the wider group of operators that verify transactions. MANTRA Chain is built with the Cosmos SDK, the framework behind many proof-of-stake networks, so no single party can simply switch the chain back on — resuming block production takes agreement across the validator set. The project is also tracing fund movements and working with exchanges as it assesses the damage, but it has not disclosed which software was exploited, how the attack worked, or whether any assets were lost.

"Our assessment of the full impact is ongoing and we are not yet in a position to confirm the complete scope," MANTRA said.

A Difficult Period for MANTRA

The incident follows a difficult stretch for the project and adds to pressure on a sector that has struggled to shake security concerns as institutions weigh tokenizing real-world assets. The largest asset managers have already moved into that market, with BlackRock issuing a tokenized money-market fund on public blockchains and Franklin Templeton running an on-chain government money-market fund. MANTRA's former OM token collapsed more than 90% in April 2025 in a bizarre sell-off, wiping out more than $5 billion in market value. Inveniam Capital Partners, which invested $20 million in MANTRA last year, said in June it planned to acquire the project, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter. With that takeover pending, the near-term milestones are the ones the team has set for itself: shipping and testing the patched release, coordinating the validator restart, tracing fund movements, and completing the still-ongoing impact assessment.

Source: Blockchain Reporter