🇺🇸👮♀️ Two MIT brothers accused of stealing $25 million worth of cryptocurrency... in 12 seconds.
Brothers James and Anton Peraire-Bueno, two former MIT students, are at the center of an unprecedented federal trial in New York.
The prosecution alleges that the two brothers manipulated the internal mechanisms of the Ethereum blockchain to access private transactions before they were validated and divert them for their own profit.
This type of strategy is similar to so-called "MEV" (Maximal Extractable Value) attacks, where users manipulate the order of transactions to gain maximum advantage.
The US government claims that the brothers went even further by:
- intentionally deceiving competing bots
- distributing false information in blocks
- and diverting funds without the consent of their owners.
But after several days of deliberation, the jury in Manhattan federal court is struggling to reach a verdict.
This is because the defense is exploiting a legal loophole, as what the two brothers did is technically permitted in the free and unregulated environment of Ethereum.
This is the first time the US government has attempted to criminally prosecute an attack based on MEV logic.
Until now, these aggressive trading strategies have been considered "system risks" rather than crimes.
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