MANTRA's Layer 1 blockchain remained offline on Friday morning after the team said it had identified the root cause of an incident in its Cosmos EVM module and contained the threat. The network has been frozen since Thursday evening, when MANTRA halted all endpoints and transactions.

In a statement posted about nine and a half hours after the halt, MANTRA said the incident was isolated to the Cosmos EVM module and affected two wallet addresses before containment. The team added that no user funds were exploited and that chain resumption was 'potentially targeted within the day.' Its status page later clarified that the two addresses were MANTRA-managed wallets, with no indication that user, exchange, or partner funds were affected.

MANTRA has not disclosed the amount involved, the specific flaw, or whether assets moved out of the two wallets. A post mortem has been promised.

The MANTRA token, renamed from OM in a 1:4 redenomination in March, hit an all-time low of $0.0041 at 23:09 UTC on Aug. 20, about an hour before the halt was disclosed, according to CoinGecko. It recovered to $0.0048 by 14:00 UTC Friday, down roughly 4% over 24 hours, with a market cap of $26.9 million and 24-hour volume of $30.3 million. The token trades 82% below its March 4 high of $0.0263.

Onchain value behind the halt is minimal. MANTRA's tracked DeFi total value locked was $548,575 on Aug. 20, with $468,411 in stablecoins, per DefiLlama. That reading fell to $5,159 on Friday, a stretch in which no MANTRA transaction has settled.

This is the second time in seven months that MANTRA has been involved in a security event in the Cosmos EVM codebase, the shared open-source stack providing Ethereum compatibility to Cosmos SDK chains. MANTRA enabled its EVM 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. The bug allowed the same token balance to be spent more than once in a single transaction. Cosmos Labs identified 15 chains running the affected code; one was exploited, and the others applied mitigations. 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.

The halt comes as Inveniam Capital Partners works to close its acquisition of MANTRA, announced in June and expected to close in the third quarter. Inveniam invested $20 million in 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 operates under a Virtual Asset Service Provider license from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority.

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