A notorious crypto trader, who gloated just last month about making away with over $100 million in a controversial price manipulation maneuver, appears to have lost millions on a similar exploit attempt that backfired early Tuesday.
Avraham Eisenberg, the trader behind October’s Mango Market hack, recently borrowed 40 million curve (CRV) tokens from decentralized lending platform Aave, according to on-chain data. The drastic move is part of an apparent scheme to sell off the tokens, plummet CRV’s value as a result, and make away with millions in short positions on the token—leaving Aave saddled with a massive quantity of bad debt.
The ploy did not execute as planned, however. CRV’s price declined early Tuesday from $0.53 to $0.41, but then quickly recovered, shooting up as high as $0.71. At writing, CRV is up 31% in the last 24 hours to $0.67, according to data from CoinGecko.
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Weeks ago, Eisenberg publicly outlined a plan to manipulate a loophole in Aave’s lending policies that would theoretically allow a scheme like the one attempted by the trader on Tuesday to succeed.
Yet, in the weeks following it, neither Aave nor Gauntlet—the financial modeling platform employed by Aave—moved to take any precautionary steps to prevent an exploit like the one Eisenberg outlined from occurring.
On Tuesday afternoon, after Eisenberg’s short strategy proved unsuccessful, Gauntlet issued a statement to clarify that Aave had emerged from the incident relatively unscathed.
“The attempt to squeeze CRV on Aave has been unsuccessful and unprofitable,” Gauntlet tweeted. “Despite this, Aave has accrued a much smaller insolvent position.”
That smaller insolvency amounts to $1.6 million in bad debt on Aave’s end, according to blockchain data analyzed by Blockanalitica—an amount that could have been far larger had Eisenberg’s exploit succeeded.