The trial of Avraham Eisenberg, accused in the attack on the DeFi platform Mango Markets, has been postponed to next year. Court documents indicate.
The hearing was originally scheduled for December 4. However, the defense asked for a postponement after, on October 26, their client was ‘unexpectedly transferred’ from a prison in New Jersey to a Brooklyn detention center. It was to that facility that the founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sent in August, where he remains after his guilty plea.
According to the lawyers’ motion, they need more time to study the case materials, to prepare, and because of the enormous volume of evidence presented by authorities.
Lawyers also stressed that they had lost time due to Eisenberg’s transfer to Brooklyn. The prosecution, in turn, deemed the time allotted for reviewing the documents sufficient.
Judge Arjun Subramanian denied the prosecutors’ objections and scheduled a hearing for April 8, 2024.
In October 2022, a group of traders led by Eisenberg attacked a Solana-based DeFi trading platform and moved out digital assets totaling about $116 million. The Mango Markets community backed the deal with the hackers, under which they returned $69 million, leaving $47 million as a bounty.
After the attack on the platform, Eisenberg earned another roughly $100,000 by releasing the Mango Inu meme token.
He was arrested in December on charges of fraud in connection with commodity futures and securities. Later, charges were brought by the CFTC and the SEC.
In November 2023, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York charged the founders and executives of the DeFi project SafeMoon with fraud amounting to millions of dollars.
Earlier, the hacker extracted assets totaling about $9 million from the project’s pool, but expressed a desire to return the funds.