Last month, an infamous cryptocurrency trader who got famous for getting off with over $100 million in a contentious price manipulation scheme reportedly lost millions on a similar exploit effort that failed early Tuesday.
According to some data, Avraham Eisenberg, the trader responsible for the Mango Market breach in October, just recently borrowed 40 million CRV tokens through the Aave platform. This appeared to be a part of the plan to sell off the tokens, decrease the value of CRV, and profit from millions of short bets on the token, leaving Aave with bad debt as such.
However, the scheme did not work out as expected. Early on Tuesday, CRV’s price dropped from $0.53 to $0.41, but it rapidly recovered and soared as high as $0.71.
Eisenberg openly described a strategy to influence Aave’s lending regulations weeks before, which would have made it possible for the trader’s Tuesday plot to succeed.
However, neither Aave nor Gauntlet – the software used by Aave – moved to take any preventative measures in the weeks that followed to stop an exploit as the one Eisenberg described.
Tuesday afternoon, when Eisenberg’s quick plan had failed, Gauntlet released a statement to make it clear that Aave had survived the encounter mostly undamaged.
In response to a tweet that has since been removed, Gauntlet said that it would contribute to paying the $1.6 million loss as part of their insolvency refund program, which guarantees to pay up losses sustained by customers like Aave as a result of Gauntlet’s “risk parameter optimization” defect.
The plan received a mixed response from some Aave DAO members.
“Better late than never, no?” – one member wrote. “Gauntlet should have done this proposal way before that Avi pulled the trigger. What were you doing all this time while Avi was bragging about his attempt to economically exploit AAVE?”
Eisenberg stole over $100 million from Mango Markets, located in Solana, last month using an oracle price manipulation. Mango DAO decided to drop all criminal proceedings against the trader in exchange for Eisenberg returning $67 million of the stolen money to assist the firm pay down its bad debt.
Eisenberg accepted the offer; the next day, he revealed himself as the trader responsible for the scheme, describing the widely perceived hack as a “very lucrative trading approach.”