OpenSea Manager Found Guilty of Insider Trading, Fined $50K
- Nathaniel Chastain, a product manager at OpenSea, has been found guilty of insider trading at the firm.
- He has been ordered to pay a $50K fine and forfeit the Ether (ETH) he acquired from trading NFTs.
- The sentencing has been described as the first insider trading case in the NFT sector.
- Chastain faces three months in prison and will have to surrender himself on November 2.
A manager at the leading non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, OpenSea, has been fined $50,000 and sentenced to prison for three months for engaging in insider trading activities at the firm. Such cases are gradually coming out of the crypto sector, where officials in key positions have made use of their knowledge to make significant profits. Top executives in the digital asset industry have also been accused of insider trading in the past.
As per an announcement from the United States Department of Justice (DoJ), US Attorney Damian Williams has sentenced OpenSea product manager Nathaniel Chastain for a total of three months in prison, along with three months of home confinement and three years of supervised release. Moreover, the DA also ordered Chastain to pay a $50,000 fine and forfeit the cryptocurrency Ether (ETH) that he acquired from trading NFTs.
“Nathanial Chastain faced justice today for violating the trust that his employer placed in him by using OpenSea’s confidential information for his own profit. Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to other corporate insiders that insider trading—in any marketplace—will not be tolerated,” Williams said.
Additionally, Chastain is required to surrender himself on November 2 but his lawyers are planning to appeal the decision and request bail, as per a report from Inner City Press. More importantly, this has been described as the first insider trading case in the NFT industry and has attracted more attention as a result.
The judge said at the sentencing that Chastain is a first time offender and there are mitigating circumstances, while adding that “he has a potentially promising future.”
It is important to mention here that a jury convicted Chastain of wire fraud and money laundering on May 3. As a product manager at OpenSea, he had the power to choose which NFT collection would be featured on the official website of the marketplace.
As reported in an earlier report, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was accused of insider trading in a lawsuit filed by investors in memecoin, Dogecoin (DOGE), which the billionaire has supported over the years. The lawsuit claimed that Musk used hired social media influencers, tweets, his appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” in 2021, and other “publicity stunts” to profit from the cryptocurrency at their expense.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
