Popular decentralised exchange Mango Markets is history, it seems. The team took to X (formerly Twitter) to announce the winding down of operations over the weekend.
The post explained that ‘Mango v4 & Boost’ are winding down operations and users should close their positions by Monday, January 13, 8PM UTC.
This closure is part of a settlement with the SEC, which had charged Mango’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and the Blockworks Foundation with selling unregistered securities and operating without a brokerage license, leading to a $700,000 penalty and the destruction of MNGO tokens.
Jorge Tenreiro, chief of the SEC’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit commented on the matter:
“Since the inception of our crypto enforcement program, our view has been that the label ‘DAO’ does not change the reality of who is behind a project.”
How Mango Markets Got Here
Mango Markets has faced a series of setbacks leading to its planned shutdown. The platform suffered a significant exploit in October 2022 when Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg manipulated its MNGO token to illegally withdraw $110 million, resulting in his conviction on fraud charges.
In 2024, Mango settled an SEC lawsuit over unregistered crypto asset sales and operating as an unregistered broker.
Additional internal strife emerged late in the year as co-founders and contributors disputed over MNGO tokens acquired from the FTX estate, culminating in a collective decision to cease operations after a governance vote confirmed the move toward a “graceful shutdown”.
Mango Market’s token MNGO has seen a 90% decline over the past few years. While it made an all-time high during the 2021 bull run, hitting 51 Cents on September 10 that year, it hasn’t fared so well in recent times.
At the time of writing, one MNGO trades for only 1.8 Cents. MNGO’s market cap fell to just $20.6 million and daily volume has fallen to $77.800 recently.
Data from DefiLlama also shows that total value locked (TVL) has plummeted from a high of $210 million in November 2021 to currently $6.74 million.
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Disclaimer
This article is provided for information only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
