Prosecutors charged Avraham Eisenberg with manipulating Mango Markets futures contracts on Oct. 11, 2022, to boost the price of swaps by 1,300% in 20 minutes. He then “borrowed” from the exchange against the inflated value of those contracts, a move the government claims was a theft.
Jury selection began Monday in New York federal court, where groundbreaking crypto cases have played out. FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced there last month to 25 years in prison for orchestrating a multibillion-dollar scheme, while Terraform Labs Pte. and co-founder Do Kwon were found liable Friday for fraud in civil trial over the firm’s 2022 collapse, which wiped out $40 billion in investor assets.
Eisenberg, a self-described “applied game theorist,” claims his actions weren’t theft at all. Rather, he says, he legally exploited a weakness in the…
