How Mavryk Beat Mantra to Monster $3B RWA Tokenization Deal

This is the story of how Mantra secured a lucrative RWA tokenization deal – and then lost it. Worth a reported $500M when it was unveiled to great fanfare a year ago, the news was followed by radio silence from its signatories. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the deal resurfaced this year. But this time it had been awarded to a different Layer 1 blockchain whose name starts with M – and its value had multiplied by 6x along the way.

Mantra, MAG, and the Deal That Never Was

On July 3, 2024, real-world asset blockchain Mantra broke the news of the largest tokenization deal in its history. “MANTRA and MAG will collaborate to democratize access to luxury UAE real estate using secure, yield-bearing vault products backed by MANTRA’s L1 technology.” It seemed by any reckoning the real deal, an agreement that would put RWAs on the map and make Mantra a major player in the race to tokenize real-world assets of all kinds.

The news was confirmed in a company blog post, which elaborated on the terms of the deal with Dubai real estate giant MAG, noting: “Investors participating in the vault product will benefit from a compelling reward structure. They can expect to receive a combined yield, with an estimated 8% APY generated from stablecoins, further augmented by MANTRA’s native token, $OM.”

CoinDesk also picked up on the story, adding that the $500M deal would include “a $75 million mega-mansion at ‘The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Dubai, Creekside’ development, part of the Keturah Resort.” On July 3, Mantra CEO John Patrick Mullin discussed the terms of the deal in a video interview, complete with Arabic subtitles for the benefit of viewers hailing from MAG Group’s seat in Dubai.

And then…nothing. It’s like the deal just disappeared. We know it was still active by late 2024, even if Mantra wasn’t actively posting about it, because JP Mullin mentioned it in passing in November. His final post on the topic occurred in January, when we tweeted: “Wild looking back at 2024: Started with a tokenomics proposal…Ended with Google Cloud, BlackRock, and MAG.”

And then, out of nowhere, a wild Mavryk appeared.

Player 2 Enters the Game

On May 1, it was revealed that MAG Group had signed a deal with Mavryk Dynamics to tokenize $3B of real estate assets including the same ones that were cited in the original Mantra deal: the Ritz-Carlton in Dubai. But this time, the real estate group was going further and committing an entire $3B of its property portfolio, with the assets to be issued on Multibank’s new RE platform operating on Mavryk.

On a superficial basis, Mavryk and Mantra appear to have a lot in common: they’re both RWA Layer 1s. They share the same broad mission and they even have broadly similar names. In American Psycho terms, one’s Paul Allen and the other’s Patrick Bateman. The question of who’s got the better haircut and business card is still to be determined. But with the Dubai property deal now looking to have passed to Mavryk, it’s clear who’s managing the Fisher account, so to speak.

Aside from the size of the deal increasing six-fold, most of the other details appear to have remained unchanged from the original Mantra deal, such as the opportunity for token-holders to earn yield on the underlying real estate, all paid out onchain. Given Mantra’s silence since first announcing its own deal last June, followed by Mavryk’s jubilation upon unveiling its own this month, it appears that MAG has jumped ship – or is it simply hedging its bets?

Mavryk, Mantra, and MAG’s Merry-Go-Round

It’s easy to speculate as to why MAG Group may have elected to move ahead with the RE tokenization deal using a different blockchain and launch partner. The most benign of these being a desire to get the ball rolling again after the original Mantra deal appears to have stagnated. Be it for technical reasons, financial ones, or some other complication, the assets MAG Group’s been wanting to tokenize have been left in limbo for close to a year.

But another possible reading of the situation is that MAG Group hasn’t jumped ship: it may have simply hedged its bets and elected to move ahead with Mavryk while also keeping the Mantra deal on the table. A hint as to this can be found in a tweet from Mantra’s JP Mullin in March, when he wrote: “I believe Dubai has a plan to tokenize & trade fractional RE assets within the first half of this year.” When asked whether the assets would be tokenized on Mantra or elsewhere, he replied “Probably both.”

Wherever the truth lies, this much can be said with confidence: Mavryk now has a deal allowing it to tokenize one of the largest real estate portfolios in RWA history. And with MAG Group seemingly determined to turn this one into a working reality, together with issuer Multibank, the momentum is very much with Mavryk. The onus is now on it to seize this opportunity and use it to transform the publicity into a working real estate reality – and the sooner the better.