- “Code Is Law” is the first serious documentary about DeFi hacks.
- It captures the chaos and moral questions behind “code is law.”
- But it leaves out some key details.
Ekin Genç is the editor-in-chief of DL News. The opinions expressed are his own.
The world was stunned last week when thieves in construction vests at the Louvre managed to disappear with jewelry worth more than $100 million.
Yet when hundreds of millions disappear from decentralized finance, no one outside of crypto hears about it; you won’t see headlines about DeFi heists in mainstream media. (The Louvre heist is of course important, but it still wouldn’t make the top 25 cryptocurrencies.)
This dissonance is the starting point of The code is the lawa new documentary on DeFi exploits:
“It’s amazing, you turn on the news and see a $450 theft at a local 7-Eleven, and the same day someone steals $25 million from a protocol and you’ll never hear about it,” Ogle, a pseudonymous blockchain security specialist, said during the opening credits.
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video, The code is the law is probably the first serious documentary to take as its subject the woes of decentralized finance – not centralized crypto exchanges or charismatic crypto fraudsters.
“It did an incredible job of representing the people involved as humans rather than misfit lunatics, and I’m proud to have been a part of it,” said Laurence Day, co-founder of Indexed Finance. DL News“although I now know more about making sausage in films than I ever wanted to!”
Given that this is a documentary about an almost exclusively online community, one might expect it to be non-cinematic, a story more suited to the podcast format.
Of course, it’s mostly people explaining things, sitting at laptops, typing, going through code, and looking through Discord logs. Yet the filmmakers still managed to make the watch truly captivating – not just for crypto enthusiasts, but for anyone interested in cybercrime.
But those deeply involved in crypto will notice at least two major omissions – for good reasons, as one of the directors told me.
The DAO hack without the hacker
You will know about DAOs as digital cooperatives behind DeFi protocols and other crypto projects. But in the early days of Ethereum, there was essentially just one DAO, and it was literally called The DAO. It operated like a giant on-chain venture capital fund.
The documentary opens with the hack of this project in 2016. Griff Green, Christoph Jentzsch and Lefteris Karapetsas recount those sleepless days as they tried to prevent the first Ethereum experiment from collapsing in real time.
Their memories give the pulse to the film. The code is the law is one of the first accounts in which the people who held Ethereum together tell their story at such length, and for that reason alone the documentary is a significant contribution to the collective memory of the crypto industry.
The DAO hack was a big problem for Ethereum as the saga led to a “hard fork” – a split in the blockchain – to reimburse depositors who lost their money in the hack. Those who disagreed with the hard fork continued to mine the original chain, which became Ethereum Classic. The other, more recent version is what we call Ethereum today.
But this monumental event, a consequence of the DAO hack, is only mentioned very briefly in The code is the law – and in the closing credits, too.
“In a film of this scale, we had to make some difficult choices about what to include,” said James Craig, one of the directors. DL News. Louis Giles is the other director.
Another glaring omission is the investigation conducted in 2022 by journalist Laura Shin, identifying Austrian programmer Toby Hoenisch as the DAO hacker. (Hoenisch denies the allegations.)
“In Hoenisch’s case, the decision was primarily thematic: our film focuses on individuals who actively defended their actions by invoking the idea that ‘code is law,'” Craig said.
“Since Hoenisch never admitted to hacking – much less offered a justification based on it – including it would have seemed tangential to the story we were telling.”
For anyone hoping to bring closure to the DAO hack story, this omission might feel like a disappointment. Yet the documentary succeeds where it counts most: capturing the chaos and urgency of those early days of The DAO hack, from the people who were directly involved.
Andean Medjedovic, the poster boy for “code is law”
The hacker who gets the most airtime in the documentary is Andean Medjedovic, a Canadian teenager who ended up being a sort of live experiment in determining whether “code is law” holds up in court.
His name is linked to two major DeFi exploits, that of Indexed Finance in 2021 and KyberSwap in 2023. According to an indictment filed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, he stole approximately $49 million and $16 million, respectively.
“It’s both cathartic to see this after all this time and a reminder of an incredibly difficult time in part of our lives, so I’m quite conflicted,” Day said. DL News.
As the documentary recalls, Medjedovic, a math prodigy, was identified by the Indexed Finance team through a seemingly absurd digital breadcrumb trail.
In a moment of careless vanity, he edited – under a username associated with him – a Wikipedia page for a Canadian television show on which he had appeared and added himself to the show’s list of notable alumni as a “notable mathematician”.
This small change was enough to connect the dots between his true identity and the heist. But this was not enough to bring him to justice, since Medjedovic is still at large.
In March 2024, Medjedovic said DL News he exiled himself to an island somewhere and claimed to have become a white hat hacker – someone who hacks legally.
Medjedovic refused to speak in documentary, Craig said DL News.
Didn’t Avi Eisenberg prove that “code is law”?
Another hacker who gets a lot of screen time is Avi Eisenberg, the exploiter of Mango Markets.
In October 2022, Eisenberg manipulated Mango Markets, the Solana-based decentralized exchange, by artificially inflating the price of his own collateral token and then borrowing against it to drain approximately $110 million in assets. He was sentenced in April 2024.
Unlike most hackers who disappear, he went public at the time, tweeting that his actions were “a very profitable business strategy” carried out entirely within the rules of the protocol (hence “code is law”).
Although he initially negotiated with Mango DAO, returning some of the funds in exchange for the promise that he would not face legal consequences, this did not stop US federal agencies from subsequently accusing him of market manipulation and fraud.
If you don’t know what happened later, you might be forgiven for thinking, by the time the credits roll, that Eisenberg has lost the “code is law” defense.
“We’re starting to see the end of the ‘code is law’ defense,” Paul Dylan-Ennis, the author of the book “Absolute Essentials of Ethereum,” says in the documentary.
“Filming wrapped during the build-up to Eisenberg’s trial, and at the time the biggest expectation among those we spoke to was that he would be found guilty,” Craig said.
“The team originally planned to end the film with a message that Eisenberg’s case had tested the ‘code is law’ defense in court, and it failed.”
And yet, last May, a judge said prosecutors had not proven that Eisenberg defrauded Mango Markets in 2022.
Although some in the industry rejoiced that “code is law” seemed to prevail in the courts, things were more nuanced than that – as they usually are.
Although the defense relied on the idea that Eisenberg’s transactions were executed within the logic of the protocol code, the judge did not conclude that this alone justified the acquittal.
Instead, the judge’s decision to overturn the most serious conviction – for wire fraud – was based on narrower legal grounds specific to that law.
“Although a jury initially found Eisenberg guilty, as we prepared to release the film, it became clear that the judge was seriously considering overturning some convictions…which ultimately happened,” Craig said.
“The precedent it sets for future cases is unclear, but it reinforces the central theme of the film: that we are in uncharted legal territory where traditional systems are struggling to keep up.”
