Mango Labs Sues Avraham Eisenberg Over Mango Markets Exploit

Avraham Eisenberg, the self-professed exploiter of Solana-based platform Mango Markets, is being sued by the DeFi lending protocol’s developer, Mango Labs, for the $47 million Eisenberg allegedly still holds from the exploit plus damages. 

According to the complaint, on October 11, 2022, Eisenberg executed a malicious attack on Mango Markets by manipulating the value of the Mango token (MNGO) and fraudulently converting approximately $114 million from Mango Markets’ depositors into his own accounts.

On October 15, Eisenberg posted a thread on Twitter in which he described being “involved with a team that operated a highly profitable trading strategy.”

Eisenberg claimed that he believed the exploit was carried out with “legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed.”

The lawsuit seeks to nullify an agreement between the Mango DAO, the decentralized autonomous organization that governs the protocol, and Eisenberg reached in the days after the exploit to return $67 million of the total $114 million. 

If he were to do this, the DAO said that it would “not pursue any criminal investigations or freezing of funds once the tokens are sent back.”

The lawsuit alleges that because the Mango DAO's $10 million insurance fund for such attacks was insufficient to cover the depositors’ losses, the DAO was forced to accept the agreement under duress.

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Eisenberg under legal scrutiny

Though Eisenberg attempted to indemnify himself in the settlement agreement with Mango DAO, it did not stop the Department of Justice from arresting him on December 27, 2022, on charges of commodities fraud and manipulation. 

On January 9, the CFTC brought its own charges against Eisenberg, indicting him on two counts of market manipulation.

Last week, the SEC joined in with charges of its own, claiming that Eisenberg “violated numerous provisions of the federal securities laws, including certain anti-fraud and anti-market manipulation provisions.”