Mango Markets announces shutdown after $117M hack, users given January deadline to exit
Mango Markets, the Solana-based DeFi platform that fell victim to a $117 million exploit in 2022, has announced its complete shutdown.
The platform’s governance proposal has received unanimous approval, with 23,347,212 votes supporting the closure.
The platform has set January 13, 2025, at 8 PM UTC as the deadline for users to close their positions when the shutdown proposals become executable. In preparation for the closure, Mango V4 will start making changes to its lending parameters.
The new protocol parameters include a reduction in the target lending ratio from 50% to 0.1% of deposits. The platform will also implement steep interest rate hikes across major cryptocurrencies, including SOL, USDC, USDT, ETH, MSOL, mangoSOL, and INF.
As per the announcement, new positions will face substantially higher barriers to entry, with collateral requirements increasing by a factor of ten.
The shutdown comes in the wake of the October 2022 exploit, where attacker Avraham Eisenberg carried out a MANGO price manipulation scheme. Using just $5 million in USDC as initial capital, Eisenberg executed a series of trades that artificially inflated the MNGO token price by approximately 1,000%.
This manipulation allowed him to borrow against greatly inflated collateral values, draining $117 million from the protocol.
After the attack, the Mango Markets team attempted to negotiate with the attacker, offering a bug bounty in exchange for returning the stolen funds.
Legal proceedings against Eisenberg started in October 2024, with charges of fraud and market manipulation that could result in up to 25 years of imprisonment.
Even though he initially defended his actions as a “highly profitable trading strategy,” Eisenberg had attempted to negotiate keeping a portion of the stolen funds through a governance proposal.
The unanimous governance vote supporting the shutdown is an indicator of the community’s acceptance of the platform’s fate.
