Many observers, and perhaps a jury, will say Eisenberg is a criminal and thief. And the fact pattern – all visible on the blockchain, detailed by Eisenberg’s own self-congratulatory tweets and described in SDNY’s criminal complaint – indicates he did indeed violate the letter of the law that prohibits market manipulation. However, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where without Eisenberg’s operation, the Mango protocol grows much larger and attracts more retail users, and it is North Korea, not Eisenberg, that exploits the protocol to drain user funds to pay for nuclear weapon development, not just a “highly profitable trading strategy.” In fact, as a result of Eisenberg’s successful Mango operation, other decentralized trading platforms implemented new risk mitigation measures, and when Eisenberg went after Aave a few weeks later, he failed.
