Crypto trader Avi Eisenberg won’t stand trial until April 8, 2024, after the judge overseeing the alleged Mango Markets exploiter’s case agreed to a delay just a month before the trial was scheduled to begin.
Federal prosecutors allege Eisenberg committed commodities manipulation and wire fraud when he deployed a “highly profitable trading strategy” against the Solana-based decentralized crypto exchange Mango Markets in October 2022.
The trial is being brought in the Southern District of New York, where just this week a team of lawyers secured the conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried in a quick-turnaround case that played out in less than a year.
Eisenberg’s trial schedule was moving nearly as speedily until late October, when the Bureau of Prisons moved him from a New Jersey federal jail to Brookyln’s more restrictive Metropolitan Detention Center, hampering defense lawyers’ efforts to prepare for his December 8 trial date, according to a filing.
His lawyers also requested additional time because of the “complex and novel legal and factual issues” at play. Eisenberg’s alleged scheme involved heady crypto-native concepts that will make any prosecution – and defense – far thornier than Bankman-Fried’s relatively plain-vanilla fraud proceeding.
The government begrudgingly agreed to push the trial until April 8, 2024, and the judge overseeing the case agreed on Friday.