MANTRA Halts Chain, Blames Cosmos EVM Module

MANTRA halted its Layer 1 blockchain late Thursday after what the team called an incident in the chain's Cosmos EVM module, and said on Friday morning it had found the root cause and contained the threat. The network is still down.

MANTRA disclosed the halt at 8:10 p.m. ET on Aug. 20, saying all endpoints and transactions were frozen and that it had no root cause or timeline to share. Nine and a half hours later it posted that "the incident was isolated to the Cosmos EVM module of MANTRA Chain and affected two wallet addresses before we achieved containment," adding that "no user funds were exploited" and that chain resumption was "potentially targeted within the day."

Its status page narrowed that further: the two addresses were "MANTRA-managed wallets," and the team has "no indication that user, exchange, or partner funds were affected." MANTRA has not published the amount involved, named the flaw, or said whether assets moved out of the two wallets. A post mortem is promised.

The freeze stops settlement on a chain built to hold regulated real-world assets. MANTRA said in May that Securitize, the tokenization platform behind BlackRock's BUIDL, had joined its active validator set. The chain also hosts mantraUSD, a stablecoin MANTRA says is backed by short-term US Treasuries, and a Layer 2 that borrows MANTRA's security. The halt lands while Inveniam Capital Partners is still working to close its acquisition of the company.

Record Low Before Disclosure

The MANTRA token, renamed from OM in a 1:4 redenomination that took effect in March, hit an all-time low of $0.0041 at 23:09 UTC on Aug. 20, about an hour before the company disclosed the halt, CoinGecko data shows. It had traded at $0.0050 four hours earlier. By 14:00 UTC Friday it had recovered to $0.0048, down roughly 4% over 24 hours, for a market cap of $26.9 million and 24-hour volume of $30.3 million. The token trades 82% below its $0.0263 high, set on March 4.

Little onchain value sits behind the halt. MANTRA's tracked DeFi total value locked was $548,575 on Aug. 20, according to DefiLlama, with $468,411 of that in stablecoins. DefiLlama's reading for the chain fell to $5,159 on Friday, over a stretch in which no MANTRA transaction has settled.

The ICS20 Precedent

This is the second time in seven months that MANTRA has been pulled into a security event in the Cosmos EVM codebase, the shared open-source stack that gives Cosmos SDK chains Ethereum compatibility. MANTRA switched its EVM on in September 2025.

In January, an attacker drained roughly $7 million from Saga's EVM network through a bug in the ICS20 precompile, according to Cosmos Labs' ASA-2026-002 advisory. State changes made during recursive calls were not reflected in the outer execution context, which let the same token balance be spent more than once in a single transaction. Cosmos Labs identified 15 chains running the affected code: six did not have the feature enabled, one was exploited, and the others applied a mitigation first. The permanent fix shipped in March.

MANTRA has not said whether this week's incident involves a precompile, or which version of the Cosmos EVM stack its mainnet was running. The cosmos/evm repository has published no advisory since March.

Halted Before The Close

Inveniam Capital Partners announced plans in June to acquire MANTRA and its affiliates, in a deal it said was expected to close in the third quarter subject to customary conditions. Terms were not disclosed. Inveniam had put $20 million into MANTRA in August 2025, and the two built NVNM Chain, a Layer 2 that MANTRA says inherits security from MANTRA Chain through Interchain Security.

MANTRA runs the chain under a Virtual Asset Service Provider license from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. It is a smaller operation than it was a year ago: the company cut staff in January across business development, marketing, HR and support, nine months after OM fell 93% in 20 minutes and erased about $5 billion of market value.

The team says it is validating a patched release on its DuKong testnet and coordinating a restart with validator partners, and will not commit to a time until testing finishes.