Former NFT site employee charged with insider trading
Former NFT site employee charged with insider trading
Non-Fungilble-Tokens (NFTs) have taken a large part of the market and marketplaces such as Opensea are reportedly turning over $US3.3Billion in profits monthly. With the increase of popularity in NFTs more and more people have been drawn to the emerging industry.
Opensea has become one of the largest NFT trading sites on Ethereum with over 600,000 individual users actively creating, trading and purchasing NFTs. Having launched in 2017 Opensea's head Office is located in New York City and another office located in San Francisco.
Some of Openseas's successful NFT listed projects have been Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Punks as well as a broad range of smaller artists that have come to develop artwork on the platform.
The company is valued at $US13.3 Billion according to Followchain.org and consists of 110 employees and in 2021 one of those employees was accused of insider trading.
It is alleged that the employee was tasked with finding NFTs to be listed on the sites homepage and the employee would find NFTs and purchase them through a number of other accounts he held for low value and then relist them on the Opensea homepage at a much higher price.
The employee was eventually found to be profiting between 2 to 5 times the value and the company fired him. The employee at the centre of the scandal was a product manager, Nathaniel Christian known as Nate.
Charged with insider trading
It wasn't long after where Nate was arrested and charged with insider trading, wire fraud and money laundering at his old job and brought before the courts.
The case is the first ever crypto insider trading case brought to trial and an interesting one that many are watching as the charges can bring a 40 year jail term. However, Cryptocurrency is promoted as "out of the reach of regulators" and therefore a decentralised economy with no rules.
The scheme Nate had running was in no way a good move however, how will the unregulated world meet with the law is still yet to be seen and will it be a strong enough case to withstand while also providing a clear message to others who seek to undermine their communities?
We'll be following this case closely. What are your thoughts on what has occurred?
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