MANTRA pulled the plug on its own blockchain late on August 20. The team stopped every validator, bridge, and relay after what it called an incident in the Cosmos EVM module, saying the fault hit two company wallets before containment. Then came a line that sits oddly next to a full network freeze: no user funds were exploited. OM had already printed a new all-time low near $0.0041 about an hour before that disclosure went out.
MANTRA froze everything and would not name a number
The chain went dark around 8:10 p.m. Eastern. MANTRA described the fault as isolated to the Cosmos EVM module and said containment came after the incident reached two company-managed addresses. It has not disclosed how much moved, or whether anything left those two wallets at all.
The token told its own story. OM slid roughly 18% to $0.0041, then clawed back toward $0.0048 by Friday, leaving a market cap near $27 million. On-chain the picture looked worse. DeFi value locked on the chain fell from about $548,575 to $5,159 as transactions stopped, per The Defiant, while trading volume jumped around 650% to $24 million. Freezing a whole chain to stop the bleeding is blunt, and not new. Litecoin once rewrote three hours of its own chain to undo an exploit.
| Incident | Saga, January 2026 | MANTRA, August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Module at fault | Cosmos EVM, ICS20 precompile | Cosmos EVM, part not specified |
| Reported loss | About $7 million | Not disclosed |
| Fix status | Permanent fix shipped March | Running version not confirmed |
| Response | Mitigations across chains | Full network halt |
A fix for this bug class shipped back in March
Rewind to January 21. An attacker hit Saga's EVM network through an ICS20 precompile flaw, a bug where state changes made inside recursive calls never reached the outer transaction. That let the same token balance get spent more than once in a single go. The take was about $7 million.
Cosmos Labs counted 15 chains exposed to the weakness. Six had the feature switched off, one, Saga, got drained, and the rest applied mitigations. A permanent fix landed in March. A lone validator once drained $10.8 million from THORChain, and only days before this halt, Maya Protocol lost $11 million to an attacker. What MANTRA has not said is whether the module that failed this week was running that March fix, or which version of the Cosmos EVM stack its mainnet ran. The team promised a full post-mortem once the system is back. Until it lands, nothing confirms that this fault and the January one share a root cause, only that both trace to the same module.
OM was deep underwater before the freeze
None of this hit a healthy token. OM was already down about 82% from its March 4 high of $0.0263, the level it touched after MANTRA migrated the chain earlier this year. The longer shadow is April 2025, when OM shed close to 90% of its value in hours and erased over $5 billion.
MANTRA is now testing a patched build, version 8.4.0, on its DuKong testnet before any mainnet restart. Holders get no timeline. The post-mortem will settle whether this was a contained wallet problem or the return of a bug Cosmos believed it had closed months ago.
