NEW YORK – Crypto trader Avi Eisenberg's criminal fraud and manipulation trial will open Tuesday after a federal judge seated a 15-person jury that includes a seller of rare books, an elementary school music director and at least two finance professionals.
The trial represents an evolution in the government's attempts to police alleged crimes in decentralized finance , a sector of the crypto trading space governed by the notion that"code is law." Mango Markets is not tightly controlled like its counterparts in centralized finance, like Coinbase. Instead, trades, borrowings and loans execute on smart contracts.
Judge Arun Subramanian sided partially with Eisenberg's defense team and told the government not to bring up the ransomware negotiator, lest it prejudice the jury. But he said if the defense opened the door by arguing the negotiations were"arm's length," the prosecutors could walk through it. Arguments over jargonistic minutiae foreshadow the complexities ahead in a trial that will test the government's recent strategy of presenting knotty crypto misdeeds as simple cases of fraud. The feds took that tactic in last year's prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried as well as in the recent civil fraud case against Terraform Labs and Do Kwon.