“Highly Profitable Trading Strategy" or Ordinary Theft?

What is Mango? Mango is a fruit decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and a platform for cryptocurrency trading, the work of which is supported by Solana and Serum. Mango is open-source, they have their own MNGO token, and the company's goal is “to merge the liquidity and usability of CeFi with the permissionless innovation of DeFi.”

In early October, Mango encountered a very unusual trader, whose name is Avraham Eisenberg. He and his team found an exploit, thanks to which they were able to manipulate the price of the MNGO token.

The attack process was described in detail by Hacken on Twitter. It all started with the hacker opening a giant futures position on the MNGO token. This position, in turn, provoked a spike in the price of MNGO.

The jump in price allowed the hackers to take a large debt position. 10 minutes before the attack, the hackers deposited $5 million so that they could take a futures position with leverage.

Of course, Mango itself reacted to the attack. In order to secure the platform, it was decided to temporarily disable “deposits on the front end.”

Then Avraham Eisenberg appeared on the scene. He started a Twitter thread that began with a tweet where Avraham says he was “involved with a team,” and called the incident “a highly profitable trading strategy.” We have written a lot about a variety of hacks, but we have not yet met such impudence and deformation of reality. The hacker himself believes that all his actions and his team’s were legitimate.

Moreover, for some reason, the thief took care of the users' funds and concluded an agreement with the insurance fund so that they would restore the funds as soon as possible.

One Twitter user condemned the hackers' actions and reminded everyone that people lost their money because hackers used this exploit. But, Avraham Eisenberg said that all user funds are fine.

A few days after the attack, a post appeared on Mango's Twitter that $67 million in various assets had been returned to the DAO after all.

Also, the company said that it will work on security. Therefore, there are no specific deadlines when users will get access to their funds.

Some users found the whole situation suspicious. But, we will not slip into conspiracy theory and leave these suspicions for your thoughts before sleep. This situation is highly unusual, but the users were not affected, and this is the main point. Be careful with your assets and don't try to pass off theft as something legal. And we continue to observe.