Nathaniel Chastain, former manager of the NFT marketplace Opensea has been accused of getting involved with insider trading. He has been charged with using the insider information of the assets that were to appear on the homepage of Opensea for trading purposes. The person purchased the NFTs and sold them soon which gave him illicit profits of $50000. The lawyers in Manhattan have described this incident as the first event of insider trading in the field of digital assets.
Chastain Pleads Not Guilty
Allison Nicholas, the prosecutor handling this case has said that Chastain was involved in using multiple accounts for the purpose of insider trading. The prosecutor has clearly said that Chastian was well aware of what he was doing but he pleads not guilty. The prosecutors have said that he bought nearly 45 NFTs and sold them at 4 to 5 times the cost.
However, his lawyers have been saying that Opensea had not disclosed what NFTs would be featured on its homepage and Chastain had no idea about this incident. However, a spokesperson from OpenSea said the company found what he was doing and he has been alleged of fraud and they asked him to leave.
This incident has raised the eyebrows of the authorities as to whether there is a need for proper regulation in the NFT space. Chastian has been denying all the charges against him since last year.
Before this incident broke out, Opensea was doing great business and carried out NFT transactions of around $3.8 B per month on its platform. However, the volume has dropped to roughly $200M in the last 30 days.
