Mango Markets hack — October 2022

On 11 October 2022 a trader opened two accounts on Mango Markets, a Solana-based margin trading and lending platform, and took opposing large positions in MNGO/USDC perpetual swaps. He then bought MNGO aggressively on the three thin spot venues that fed the platform's price oracle. The reported oracle price of MNGO rose more than thirteenfold in about thirty minutes, which made the profitable side of his paired positions appear worth far more than it was. Using that inflated unrealised profit as collateral, he borrowed and withdrew essentially every asset in the protocol's lending pools, leaving depositors with the loss.

Mango Labs' civil complaint puts the amount at approximately $114 million. The CFTC, SEC and Justice Department each described it as over $110 million, which is consistent rather than competing, since the CFTC's own breakdown of $67 million returned plus roughly $47 million retained also totals about $114 million. Within days Avraham Eisenberg publicly identified himself as part of the team behind the trades and argued they were a legal trading strategy. He put a proposal to the Mango DAO under which he returned about $67 million and kept the rest in exchange for the DAO not pursuing him. Mango Labs later sued, saying the DAO accepted under duress because its $10 million insurance fund could not cover depositor losses.

Eisenberg was arrested in December 2022 and convicted in April 2024. In 2025 the trial judge threw out the convictions, reasoning that Mango Markets was a self-executing DeFi protocol whose design flaw had merely been exploited, and that there was no evidence the protocol's borrow function carried any obligation to repay. Prosecutors filed an appeal on 22 December 2025. The Mango DAO voted to shut the platform down in January 2025 following an SEC settlement.