The crypto sector saw a big shakeup as a popular altcoin, Mantra (OM), crashed rapidly in the space, erasing an over $6 billion market value within an hour, as noted in our previous news story. The shockwave spread across exchanges as panic set in. Moreover, prominent voices in the space raised alarms about the fragility of trust in real-world asset (RWA) projects. IOTA founder Dominik Schiener grabbed this opportunity to attract attention toward their ecosystem.
The OM Collapse & IOTA Founder’s Latest Remarks
A vocal crypto influencer known as Jonny questioned the whole industry in a post to X. He wrote, “OM, the biggest RWA coin by market cap… essentially rugged today. This industry just simply isn’t serious whatsoever.” For context, allegations of market manipulation, token supply centralization, and insider sell-offs had been mounting for months, but many had overlooked the red flags.
The recent collapse was caused when followers of insiders moved over 6.5 million OM tokens (around $41 million) into a wallet on the OKX exchange. The sell-offs that followed ensued across Binance and OKX. Private investors winded up offloading tokens to take advantage of heavy discounts on OTC deals, and hence, the price began to plunge even further.
Thus, industry confidence in RWA-based projects has been shaken. Nonetheless, a few legacy platforms are using the moment to reiterate their dedication to long-term development. In response, IOTA’s Schiener pointed out that IOTA is serious and has been on the market since 2015. He wrote, “IOTA is serious, and has been on the market since 2015. We have been through every big bear and bull market and are stronger than ever.”
Info On IOTA Rebased Upgrade
This comes after a long list of major updates from the IOTA Foundation. In December 2024, token holders voted to ‘IOTA Rebased’, a radical upgrade that would have departed from the traditional UTXO model and moved towards a modern object-based system powered by the Move Virtual Machine (MoveVM), as highlighted in our previous report.
The purpose of Rebased is to provide IOTA higher programmability and security. Moreover, resource-oriented smart contracts, static and formal verification of code, and new incentives for validators and delegators are key components of the upgrade. They also give about 767,000 IOTA tokens in each epoch to compensate network participation while the burn mechanisms are introduced to offset inflation and stabilize the token supply.
The public testnet for Rebased is currently live, and the mainnet launch is in progress. IOTA’s revamped staking and gas systems mark a significant step forward, with validator requirements now including 2 million IOTAs and high-spec hardware.
As Schiener put it, “There are a lot of tourists in this space that are simply there to extract value. We are here to be one of the few honest ones.” The IOTA token price remains stable despite a volatile market, trading at $0.1628 with a 0.09% intraday gain on Tuesday, April 15.