MANTRA Chain Halts Operations After Security Incident

MANTRA Chain, a Dubai-licensed Layer 1 blockchain, has been frozen since Thursday evening after an incident in its Cosmos EVM module. The company says two wallet addresses were affected and that no user funds were exploited.

MANTRA disclosed the halt at 8:10 p.m. ET on Aug. 20, stating all endpoints and transactions were frozen, with no root cause or timeline to share. Nine hours later, it posted an update saying the incident was isolated to the Cosmos EVM module and that containment had been achieved.

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

This incident follows a similar security event in the Cosmos EVM codebase seven months ago, where an attacker drained roughly $7 million from Saga's EVM network through a bug in the ICS20 precompile. The permanent fix was shipped in March, but MANTRA has not said whether this week's incident involves a precompile.

MANTRA hosts various assets on its chain, including mantraUSD, a stablecoin backed by short-term US Treasuries, and NVNM Chain, a Layer 2 that borrows security from MANTRA Chain through Interchain Security. The halt lands while Inveniam Capital Partners is still working to close its acquisition of the company.

The MANTRA token hit an all-time low of $0.0041 at 23:09 UTC on Aug. 20, about an hour before the company disclosed the halt. It had traded at $0.0050 four hours earlier and recovered to $0.0048 by Friday afternoon.