Mango Markets Hacker Avraham Eisenberg’s Trial Heads To Jury

It appears that the fate of crypto trader Avraham Eisenberg, who was involved in Mango Markets $110 million attack, now lies in the hands of twelve New York jurors. 

Avraham Eisenberg at the Mercy of Jurors

As reported by Bloomberg, these federal jurors are tasked with deciding whether the crypto trader manipulated the Mango Markets cryptocurrency exchange to steal $110 million or if he executed a perfectly legal strategy that was permissible under the rules of the platform. A closing argument was held by the jury on the government case on Wednesday. 

The defense case was held on Monday and Tuesday with Eisenberg’s mother and two other family members in attendance. Markedly, the defendant did not get the chance to testify even after his attorneys had earlier suggested that he might do so during the trial.

Rather, the case was hinged more on the testimony of a single expert witness Jeremy Sheridan, a former Secret Service agent-turned-crypto investigations consultant.

For the two days, he focused his argument on the mechanisms that assisted Eisenberg’s trades. Sheridan also talked about the difficulty of understanding whether Eisenberg’s borrows were, according to Mango Markets’ codebase, actually borrows at all. 

Unfortunately, the court threw out a significant part of his testimony, citing that his knowledge of Mango Markets’ codebase was itself insufficient.

Mango Markets Carted Away With $110M

Eisenberg was arrested in Puerto Rico in December 2022, two months after Mango Markets was hacked. 

Before he was identified as the hacker, it was said that 

“They temporarily spiked up their collateral value, and then took out massive loans from the Mango treasury.” 

He was eventually charged with commodities fraud, commodities manipulation, and wire fraud in connection with his Mango Markets exploit.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sued Eisenberg for “manipulation of a swap” and for allegedly using a deceitful method to influence the price of the MNGO token. Amidst the lawsuit, he agreed to return $67 million of the ill-gotten funds. However, Mango Labs demanded the rest of the money as well and this led to another indictment for the crypto trader. 

Additionally, the Mango Markets hacker was accused of attacking other protocols too. 

“Since the attack, defendant has continued to plot to attack Mango Markets further, in public, and has used the converted funds to attack other cryptocurrency protocols as well,” the company said.