OpenSea confirms executive used insider knowledge when buying NFTs

Read the full article by: Ryan Weeks

One of the biggest NFT exchanges, Open Sea is no stranger to being in the headlines, but this time it’s not for breaking volume records. Late last night it was reported that the head of product at Open Sea, Nate Chastain, was found to be using an unknown Ethereum wallet to buy NFT’s drops before hitting the front page, & then selling them shortly after listing. Within any regular financial market, this would be considered insider trading and could garner a big lawsuit, but with there being no regulation around the market it is now up to Opensea to make the change. And a change came quickly with a blog post being posted this morning stating “Yesterday we learned that one of our employees purchased items that they knew were set to display on our front page before they appeared there publicly,” said OpenSea. “This is incredibly disappointing. We want to be clear that this behavior does not represent our values as a team. We are taking this very seriously and are conducting an immediate and thorough review of this incident so that we have a full understanding of the facts and additional steps we need to take.”. While this should bring some good faith back to the company, I would still be cautious as ever to dive into the NFT market.