My realistic price prediction for Mantra (OM): zero
Here is my realistic price prediction for Mantra, the coin trading under OM: it is going to zero. In my view, this is an obvious dumpster fire, and I'm going to give you the truth even if it stings. I'm tired of watching people get ripped off on these garbage coins over and over again when there's better stuff out there. So look at the picture. Mantra is a top 25 crypto right now, and it has been around since 2020. Then you have an obviously manipulated pump on the chart. To me it looks like one person just bought all of it. That is what we've seen before. This looks like textbook price manipulation, and that's all I think it is.
What is the real value behind this project? Look at the token unlocks. Right now, in my reading of it, 54% of the tokens are still locked. Look at the fully diluted market cap, somewhere around $10 billion. The best technology in crypto, in my opinion, is Internet Computer Protocol, and it has half or less of that fully diluted valuation. To me Mantra is wildly overvalued and is going to go right back into the dumpster where it sat for years.
The website tells you nothing
Let's look at their website, mantrachain.io. "Bridging, bringing the world's financial ecosystem on chain." Wow, how exactly are they doing that? It's a "purpose-built" chain. I just saw another scam coin that had the exact same "purpose-built" phrasing in the text, which I don't usually see. It seems like the same person makes all of these websites for these useless coins, which would make sense to me. And then there's this line: "a permissionless chain for permissioned applications." What does that even mean?
I'm a believer in following Warren Buffett's advice. If you buy a product that a company creates, and you use it and you like it, then you consider buying the stock. So ask yourself: are you using Mantra? Have you been using Mantra? Is Mantra something you use every day? If not, then why would you buy it? Why would you hold it and speculate on it? In my opinion that's insane. I only buy cryptos that I'm using every day myself, which is why something like 98% of my portfolio is Internet Computer Protocol and OpenChat, because I use those every day. I don't see any reason a regular person in retail would ever use Mantra.
When I look at their site, I just see pretty pictures and meaningless words on a page. An "identity system with decentralized ID." Well, who already has that, fully functional and working amazingly? Internet Computer Protocol. Who has the best real-world assets platform in the world, in my view? Internet Computer Protocol, because it's the only tech where you can put everything on chain, which is really important for real-world assets. So by comparison, Mantra looks to me like a fraud. I don't see anything useful in there.
No transparency, no real team
Now go over to their About Us page. Is there one single person listed by name working on this project? This could be a stock photo of strangers for all I know. Who are these people? Did they pay people off the street to get together for a photo? I don't recognize anyone. There's not one person definitively listed as being part of this team. Maybe there are real people building it, but why is there no transparency? Compare that to Internet Computer's DFINITY, where there are hundreds of people's faces, names, and career histories. Why is that not here?
In my opinion, they don't want you to know who is working on the project because it's something sketchy and not trustworthy. They're comfortable throwing up a photo of some gathering at some point, but not telling you who anyone is. I could launch my own coin tomorrow, take a random picture without any context, and slap it on my website too. Are these people actually working on the project? There's no way to tell. To me, that lack of transparency is a critical issue. I demand it of anything I invest in. That's also why I'm not investing in Bitcoin: I don't know who created it. I don't know if it was the CIA, or Satoshi Nakamoto sitting on a huge pile of coins. I just don't know, and that bothers me.
Fake engagement and bot armies
Look at their X account for tokenizing real-world assets. A post with 18,000 views putting out generic crap: "It's just a matter of time before everything gets tokenized." Okay, but how are you adding anything meaningful to the world? It says this is a layer one blockchain for real-world assets, from institutions to individuals. Why would someone in retail participate in this when there's no clear opportunity to even use it?
Now look at the comments. If you look at my posts, or a lot of the Internet Computer posts, there are real people posting and having conversations. This Mantra post has 18,000 views, and the comments are things like "inevitable." Those look like obvious bots to me. Not every single one, but bots and circle jerks. "Oh, it's a real-world asset L2." That's a circle jerk. They're botting. They're cheating. Then somebody thankfully comes in and says "big scammer." Yes, big scammer. There is almost no real engagement on 18,000 impressions. And that's just one post. Another has 5,000 impressions and four comments. Another has 11,000 and no real comments. All these posts are the same.
For comparison, I have a post with 11,000 impressions, and the comments are real people posting real comments and genuinely interacting. You can see the huge difference between that and what looks to me like fraud. I'm calling it: this is fraud. Roughly 400-some thousand followers, and only five accounts I follow are even following it. To me this is textbook crypto mafia: cheat you out of your money, make a nice website, provide no transparency, give you no clear use case, use bots to push up the follower count, use bots to push the engagement, fool regular people, and build a huge market cap to rip you off blatantly in your face. There's a manipulated price pump right there on the chart. I see no reason anyone should use this or invest in it at all.
They've already given up
Let's look at their YouTube channel. Do they have the look? They haven't even put out one video in two months. And the videos they did post are so short they disgust me. 15,000 subscribers on the official channel, and only a few hundred views per video. To me, they've given up. They don't even put videos out anymore.
You've got to be able to do this research yourself, and it's easy stuff. It took me less than 10 minutes to tear this apart, honestly more like five. I do this research on my live stream and take requests if people want me to look at specific cryptos. Someone says, "Hey, look at this one," and it just sucks, and it's obvious, because in my experience almost everything in crypto is lying, cheating, stealing, manipulation, and ripping you off. That's why so much of it exists. It's the bigger picture of life: traps upon traps. You think you're breaking out of the system by getting into crypto, and then you get snagged by a thousand, a million worthless altcoins.
By comparison, here's an example of what I think is worth investing in. My website is actually on the blockchain. You can talk to me face to face on Zoom, if you count that as real, and you can join my OpenChat, which is fully on chain and totally free. You don't have to pay any ICP, and you can start chatting right away in the free chat. That's an example of a blockchain that I believe is worth investing in. I also have a totally free crypto course to help you do some real learning, so it's harder for people to lie, cheat, and steal from you. If you want to dig deeper into how I think about all of this, I share more in my Money playlist. You think you can handle the truth? Now you've got it.