Monday, the commodity futures trading commission (cftc) filed charges against avraham eisenberg for manipulating the mango markets decentralized exchange and stealing over $110 million in digital assets. the u.s. department of justice arrested eisenberg in december 2022 for his involvement in the hack, which occurred on october 11. eisenberg had created two anonymous accounts at mango markets and funded them with $5 million each in usdc.
Hack took place on the solana-based decentralized exchange mango markets, which is governed by a dao and allows investors to lend, borrow, swap, and use leverage to trade crypto. mango dao offered the mango market attacker a $47 million bug bounty and the promise of not pressing charges if they sent back $67 million worth of tokens. eisenberg publicly agreed to the terms of the deal, but it is unclear whether the tokens were returned.
The two accounts, eisenberg established a $19 million long position and a $19 million short position of over 400 million mngo/usdc swaps at approximately $0.04. the goal of eisenberg’s scheme was to artificially inflate the value of his swap contract holdings on mango markets through price manipulation. mango markets did not require any identifying information to trade on the platform, allowing eisenberg to create both accounts anonymously. eisenberg described the maneuver as “a highly profitable trading strategy.”
