MANTRA was launched in 2020, where OMʼs TGE occurred as an ERC20 token on Ethereum in August 2020. Originally launched as a DeFi project, OM was MANTRAʼs dApp token with a hard cap supply of 888,888,888.

The project always had a focus on tokenization of assets and regulatory compliance. And through our experience working closely with regulators and financial institutions, the marketʼs need for a purpose-built RWA L1 became clear to us. September 2022 marked the next phase of MANTRAʼs evolution, where we began building MANTRA Chain and our longer term vision of an onchain RWA ecosystem with users, dapps, TVL and more. Originally MANTRA Chain would have a separate token to OM. After community members reached out to the team expressing concern about OM losing value and mindshare, we explored merging OM and MANTRA Chain together.

In February 2024, a community proposal to make OM the native L1 staking coin for MANTRA Chain passed unanimously. As such, we are deprecating our ERC20 OM supply over time as we migrate OM over to mainnet where it will now function as the chainʼs L1 staking coin. We have created a one-way bridge for OM holders to upgrade their ERC20 OM tokens to mainnet staking coins. For exchanges, all existing networks (Ethereum, BSC, Polygon and Base) will initially be preserved and MANTRA Chain will be added as a fifth network. Users are incentivized to migrate their ERC20 OM to mainnet OM (on MANTRA Chain) in order to receive staking rewards. As of 17th December 2024, 37.2m ERC20 OM have been bridged from EVM to mainnet (i.e. burned on ERC20 and minted as mainnet staking coins).

MANTRAʼs mainnet went live on October 10th 2024, announced publicly on October 23rd 2024. Today, MANTRA aims to be the the ledger of record for real world assets (RWAs) with OM functioning as the native staking coin of the chain.