One of the Mango Markets hackers made $100 000 from launching a meme token

What’s new? One of the participants in the Mango Markets DeFi-platform exploit, Avraham Eisenberg, said he made $100 000 from launching the Mango Inu meme token. He said he did not promote the project, but bots bought more than $250 000 worth of the asset in half an hour. Earlier, Eisenberg said he was involved in withdrawing $114 million from the platform on October 12. He did not admit his actions were illegal, calling them the use of a “highly profitable trading strategy.” As a result of the exploit, Mango Markets lost solvency, and Eisenberg agreed to pay back $67 million, according to the platform's community proposal.

(sadly the bots frontran the liq pull and I forgot to use flashbots so I only made like 100k instead of 250k for a half hour of work)— Avraham Eisenberg (@avi_eisen) October 23, 2022

How did the author comment on the project? The user does not consider his project illegal, as he did not promote the coin in any way and did not make any promises about the yield, and therefore Mango Inu does not fall under the definition of securities. In addition, Eisenberg stressed that all transactions took place on the open market.

However, he said he was only able to earn $100 000 instead of a possible $250 000 due to a botting error. Eisenberg explained that other people's bots saw his transactions in the liquidity pool, while he himself forgot about the flashbots.

What is known about Mango Markets? It is a trading and credit DeFi platform based on the Solana blockchain. The hack was the sixth largest DeFi-exploit in history, behind the $130 million Cream Finance hack. As of October 24, 15:00 UTC, the native MNGO token is trading at $0,018, having gained 0,9% overnight, according to CoinGecko.

On October 21, a hacker stole $300 000 from Olympus DAO by taking advantage of a vulnerability in the smart contract for the platform's native token bonds but returned the funds hours later.

To learn more about the reasons behind the growing number of attacks on DeFi projects, see this article by GetBlock Magazine.