A Manhattan federal judge declared a mistrial in the case against James and Anton Peraire-Bueno, the MIT-trained brothers accused of pulling off a 12-second Ethereum transaction that yielded $25 million. Jurors told the court the process had become an emotional strain. “We are unanimously of the belief that we are not making any progress,” they wrote, after describing tears and “multiple nights of sleeplessness.” US District Court Judge Jessica G. L. Clarke ended the four-week trial at 7 p.m., explaining, “There’s nothing in the note to indicate that if I hold them over until Monday, that anybody will change the result here,” before sending them home.
We saw how divided they were even outside the jury room. “We all did our best,” one male juror said. Another told a prosecutor, “There was markedly little debate about the facts,” adding, “It was understanding the law,” and, “Finding the appropriate standard was a struggle for us.”
Prosecutors said the brothers staged a “first of its kind” heist by “poisoning” a proposed block with invalid zeros, letting them see and tamper with victims’ trades. The core message to jurors was simple: “There is no separate law about fraud on the blockchain,” Assistant US Attorney Danielle Marie Kudla argued. Whether on the phone, online, or on Ethereum, “You can’t tell a lie and deceive people to get their money.”
Defense lawyers told a different story. They said preprogrammed bots battled in a “brutally competitive” arena and that the brothers won fairly. “They took on risk and enjoyed tremendous success,” Daniel Nathan Marx said. “They should be celebrated, not villainized by the prosecution.” In earlier filings, the team warned against criminalizing network behavior: “The indictment is an audacious attempt by the United States government to regulate, for the first time and through criminal prosecution, the duties and interactions of the Ethereum Network — a decentralized, trustless system that uses economic incentives to drive behavior and relies on consensus to effect changes,”
The deadlock marks the third failure this year for high-profile digital-asset prosecutions in Manhattan, even as the DOJ touts wins such as a $15 billion bitcoin forfeiture in Brooklyn. Prosecutors have not said if they will retry the brothers. For now, they walk out with their families, while the government weighs whether this fight over code, markets, and fraud standards starts again.
