Mango Markets Exploiter Avi Eisenberg Gets 4+ Years—But Not for Crypto Crimes

DeFi’s most infamous arbitrageur just got slapped with prison time—though not for the $110M mango-futures heist that made him famous.

Federal prosecutors nailed Eisenberg on unrelated child pornography charges, proving even crypto’s cleverest exploiters can’t outrun old-fashioned law enforcement. The sentence? A sobering 51 months behind bars.

Meanwhile, the Mango Markets case—where Eisenberg openly bragged about his ’legal’ oracle manipulation—remains unresolved. Because nothing says ’decentralized finance’ like waiting years for regulators to decide if stealing with smart contracts is actually stealing.

Presentence filings

In their sentencing submission to the court, prosecutors asked for Eisenberg to serve between 6.5 and 8 years in prison, stressing the seriousness of his offenses. Though Eisenberg has maintained that his crypto trading actions on Mango Markets were “compliant” with the protocol and thus didn’t break the law (an argument a jury clearly did not buy), prosecutors say Eisenberg was well aware that what he was doing was a crime. Before his Mango Markets heist, he’d filed suit against someone else for crypto-related market manipulation, and fled the country for Israel once his identity as the attacker was unveiled.

Prosecutors also detailed Eisenberg’s child sexual abuse material charges, telling the judge that between 2017 and 2022, he downloaded 1,274 sexually-explicit images and videos of children — including toddlers and two-month-old infants — as well as “depictions of sadistic violence and masochism against children.”

In their own sentencing submission to the court, Eisenberg and his lawyers attempted to blame his strict religious upbringing and his lifelong “struggles to conform to social norms” for his crimes, calling him a “fundamentally decent person” and detailing his challenges adapting to the “daily horrors” of life in jail.