According to The Block, the New York Federal Court will begin hearing the criminal fraud and manipulation charges against Avraham Eisenberg on Tuesday (9th), examining his alleged actions of profiting $116 million through the manipulation of the Solana ecosystem’s decentralized finance platform, Mango Markets. The trial is expected to last two weeks.
While Eisenberg confirmed that he and his team planned an attack on Mango Markets in October 2022, he claims it was simply a “highly profitable trading strategy” that legally exploited the protocol’s design.
The strategy involved Eisenberg manipulating the price of Mango’s native token, MNGO, by manipulating the oracle feed and using inflated tokens as collateral to obtain approximately $116 million worth of cryptocurrency loans, causing the platform to be insolvent. Eisenberg later negotiated with Mango DAO and agreed to return $67 million in funds.
Eisenberg was arrested in December 2022 and has been charged by the US Department of Justice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In the US, the crime of telecommunications fraud can carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
