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  • 🏴‍☠️ Mantra Crash: Someone’s Getting Called Out

🏴‍☠️ Mantra Crash: Someone’s Getting Called Out

Plus, 🧨 Tether fuels OCEAN mining push, 💸 DEX exploit drains $7.5M from KiloEx users, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
April 15, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 🕵️ Names named in OM crash

  • ⚒️ Tether’s controversial mining move

  • 🧨 KiloEx ripped for $7.5M

The Financial Freedom Report explores the role currency and banking play in the civil liberties and human rights struggles of those living under authoritarian regimes and how Bitcoin is used to push back.

By Tikta

Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT suggested on Monday that REEF Finance founder Denko Mancheski and an individual using the X name Fukogo Ryoshu were somehow involved in last weekend’s OM token crash, which saw the asset’s value plummet more than 90% on Sunday.

Days before OM's collapse, the pair allegedly sought large loans from multiple parties, using their OM holdings as collateral, raising concerns about coordinated dumping.

ZachXBT highlighted REEF's past issues, including a reported $80 million over-the-counter transaction with Alameda Research in 2021 and Binance's delisting of the DeFi platform last October due to earlier market manipulation concerns. 

“Based on my findings it was not Laser Digital or Shorooq,” ZachXBT said, referring to the two venture capital firms accused of being involved in the OM incident. “However I do not know the extent of how much the Mantra team knew about the actions of Denko.”

Meanwhile, Mantra's leadership has proposed token buybacks and burns to stabilize OM's price, which remains significantly lower than its pre-crash value. 

Stablecoin giant Tether on Monday announced plans to allocate its current and future Bitcoin mining hashrate to OCEAN, a decentralized mining pool developed by Bitcoin Core contributor Luke Dashjr, a figure who has stirred controversy for his past criticism of Bitcoin Ordinals and Inscriptions.

OCEAN’s approach reduces reliance on dominant pools such as Foundry USA and AntPool, which control transaction selection in traditional setups. Instead, OCEAN’s open-source DATUM protocol enables miners to create their own block templates rather than relying on centralized intermediaries.

Dashjr, who once dismissed Ordinals as “spam,” was also accused of censoring Whirlpool CoinJoin transactions and BIP47 notifications on OCEAN by the team behind Bitcoin non-custodial wallet Samourai Wallet — whose founders were arrested last year and charged with money laundering — although Dashjr claimed it was a bug on Samourai’s end.

Tether’s backing of OCEAN will likely be a welcome development for the mining pool, which currently accounts for less than 1% of Bitcoin’s total network hashrate. 

Decentralized exchange KiloEx suffered a $7.5 million exploit on Monday, which blockchain security firms including PeckShield attributed to a price oracle vulnerability that allowed attackers to manipulate asset valuation.

The exploiter allegedly set an artificial ETH/U.S. dollar price of $100 when opening a position, then closed it at a manipulated price of $10,000, netting $3.12 million in a single transaction. 

Security firm Cyvers said the attacker’s addresses were funded via Tornado Cash.

Blockchain analysts also identified inadequate access controls in KiloEx's price oracle system as the core enabler of the exploit, as they allowed unauthorized modifications to pricing data.

The platform's native token, KILO, plunged 30% following the hack and remains 75% below the all-time high it reached in March.

“We are collaborating with ecosystem partners to trace and recover funds where possible,” the KiloEx team said in a statement on X. 

  • ⏳ The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission postponed decisions on rule changes for staking and in-kind redemptions in exchange-traded funds created by Grayscale, VanEck, and WisdomTree to June, as it continues shaping a long-term crypto regulatory framework through its internal task force.

  • 🔍 Crypto services platform Anchorage Digital is under scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “El Dorado” Task Force, which has reportedly contacted ex-employees about the firm’s practices, adding to pressure on a company previously cited for anti-money laundering and know-your-customer compliance failures.

  • 🌐 Binance and KuCoin experienced service disruptions due to an Amazon Web Services outage that briefly halted withdrawals and continues to affect order execution, while other crypto platforms such as Rabby and DeBank also reported downtime tied to the AWS incident.

  • ⛏️ Bitcoin mining profitability dropped 7.4% in March as the average BTC price fell 11.2% and transaction fees slid 9.1%, although U.S.-listed miners increased their network share to nearly 25%, with MARA and CleanSpark leading production.

  • 🎬 “Vitalik: An Ethereum Story,” a documentary chronicling the rise of Ethereum’s creator from teen coder to industry-defining leader, will debut globally on Apple TV and Prime Video today.

  • 🔐 Phantom Wallet is facing a $3.1 million lawsuit alleging its Solana wallet exposed user funds to theft by storing private keys in unencrypted browser memory, leading to a $500,000 memecoin hack.

  • 💶 Circle’s EURC supply jumped 43% to $246 million in one month amid euro strength and U.S. trade fears, with token activity surging across Ethereum, Solana, and Base.

  • 📵 South Korea blocked 14 crypto exchange apps, including KuCoin and MEXC, from Apple’s local app store for operating without having registered with the Financial Service Commission’s Financial Intelligence Unit, expanding its crackdown on unlicensed foreign platforms.

  • 📉📈 Story Protocol’s IP token dropped 20% and fully rebounded within hours on Monday in a high-volume trading session on Binance and OKX, prompting speculation about potentially coordinated over-the-counter activity.

  • 📱 Kraken launched commission-free U.S. stock and ETF trading for selected users via the Alpaca brokerage platform, offering fractional shares and planning wider expansion across the U.S., UK, EU, and Australia as part of its multi-asset platform strategy.

  • 🍁 Canada is set to debut four spot Solana ETFs, with staking rewards included, on April 16 via Purpose, Evolve, CI, and 3iQ, making the country the first to approve such products as U.S. asset managers await regulatory decisions on similar filings.