[squeaky-clean]

"Then, he/she used the funds to buy the 483mm units of $MNGO perps (at a price of $0.0382 per unit). The perpetrator’s actions made $MNGO’s spot market price, reaching as high as $0.91"

Is the second sentence sentence missing some words? Or is there something specific about Mango that makes this make sense? If 483mm units were bought for $0.0382 per unit (is that the average price, a fixed price?), why did the spot price suddenly increase 30x, was there that big of a spread in the order book? Also how does that add up to $5mm USDC? Isn't $0.0382 x 483mm = $18.4506mm?

[anonymoushn]

First question: yes, the missing part is that the attacker also had to buy a bunch of spot mango tokens on centralized exchanges to drive the price up after establishing the large position.

Second question: Mango Markets lets you trade perpetual futures with leverage, so you don't need collateral equal to the notional value of the contracts you buy.

[salawat]

Okay, let me see of I got this right.

User acquires an/a set of in perpetuity futures contracts. (A future without an expiry date, effectively, what? A pin I guess?) Idea being, this order indicates intent to swap at volume $MNGO to $USDC at $RATE.

Centralized exchanges sees the futures order, and starts cranking up the price of $MNGO due to the increased interest in swapping based on the presence of the Futures.

The Futures contracts are leveraged, but require no collateral, because there is no expiry date on the Future (no intended date of delivery).

So the order volume (spot token purchases) induced upward price movement and... What? Caused other uninvolved investors to buy his acquired tokens at a peak, and he just takes the money and cashes out never intending to actually honor or settle up the perps, which won't margin call, because they're still "good" but will never mature? I'm failing to see an exfil path for ill-gotten gains/financial chicanery beyond the seemingly obvious wash trading.

If anyone can help detangle this, I'd be much obliged. This kind of market weirdness is interesting, but inscrutable at times, when there's usually like 6 pieces of networked jargon needed to render something that doesn't tend to line up to anything tangible in the conventional sense.

[anonymoushn]

> User acquires an/a set of in perpetuity futures contracts. (A future without an expiry date, effectively, what? A pin I guess?) Idea being, this order indicates intent to swap at volume $MNGO to $USDC at $RATE.

No, a perpetual future is like a basket of daily futures that roll over automatically when they expire. Also, an order is different from a position. The user acquired a long position in one account and a short position in another.

> Centralized exchanges sees the futures order, and starts cranking up the price of $MNGO due to the increased interest in swapping based on the presence of the Futures.

No, the activity on the Mango DEX had no impact on the price of MNGO on centralized exchanges. The user had to separately buy a bunch of MNGO on centralized exchanges to manipulate the price.

> The Futures contracts are leveraged, but require no collateral, because there is no expiry date on the Future (no intended date of delivery).

They require collateral. That's why the user had to send $5mm to each of the two accounts they used at the Mango DEX as the first step of the attack.

> So the order volume (spot token purchases) induced upward price movement and... What? Caused other uninvolved investors to buy his acquired tokens at a peak, and he just takes the money and cashes out never intending to actually honor or settle up the perps, which won't margin call, because they're still "good" but will never mature? I'm failing to see an exfil path for ill-gotten gains/financial chicanery beyond the seemingly obvious wash trading.

The user could withdraw dollars from Mango because their long MNGO-PERP position was in profit.

[squeaky-clean]

Thank you! It makes sense now, and also... wow.

[strangattractor]

To you maybe:)