Securities + Corporate Finance

On January 20, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against Avraham Eisenberg, alleging that he used manipulative and deceptive trading practices to siphon $116 million of digital assets from the Mango Markets digital asset trading platform. This happened just a few months after Eisenberg made a public statement on Twitter that he had made a lot of money on Mango Markets and opined that “It is not illegal to be smarter than your counterparties in a swap transaction nor is it improper to understand a financial product better than the people who invented that product.” The SEC’s recent actions make clear that it disagrees with Eisenberg over whether his trading strategy was legal. In this video, Jeffrey Alberts, co-chair of Pryor Cashman’s FinTech Group, discusses what federal agencies allege that Eisenberg did, why these agencies concluded it was unlawful, and what people who trade digital assets can do to stay on the right side of the law.

The U.S. government has recently announced a variety of sanctions against certain Russian oligarchs, Russian entities and regions of Ukraine. There's a number of ways in which this can impact cryptocurrency and blockchain companies, even those that are not doing business in the United States. In this video, Jeffrey Alberts explains the recent sanctions programs, how they apply to crypto companies, and what crypto companies should do now to ensure that they don't violate the sanctions that the U.S. government has recently imposed.