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Former OpenSea employee gets indicted for insider trading
Nate Chastain has been arrested and charged with wire fraud and money laundering. The charges carry with them a max penalty of 20 years in prison. This means he can get 40 years for front-running Jpegs.
What happened:
Nate was an early employee at OpenSea and the company’s head of product. His position gave him some insider knowledge regarding which NFT collections would be featured on the front page of their website.
He would buy a few NFTs from those collections and then flip them once after the price went up. This process allowed him to routinely bank a 2-5x profit per flip.
Nate secretly did this for a couple of months using random OpenSea and wallets. His efforts weren’t enough as all it took was one blockchain sleuth smart (or bored) enough to track his wallet activity…
<div data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM" class="tweet" data-attrs="{"url":" @opensea why does it appear @natechastain has a few secret wallets that appears to buy your front page drops before they are listed, then sells them shortly after the front-page-hype spike for profits, and then tumbles them back to his main wallet with his punk on it?","username":"0xZuwu","name":"0xZuwu.eth 🧪","date":"Tue Sep 14 23:28:39 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"retweet_count":2751,"like_count":12267,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}”>
After getting busted, Nate admitted to his wrongdoing and lost his OpenSea shares.
The case seems pretty singular to Nate’s – not the kickoff of a wide regulatory crackdown on NFTs that many initially thought.
<div data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM" class="tweet" data-attrs="{"url":"https://twitter.com/SHL0MS/status/1532065627971543041?s=20&t=bzhJodjkQlV328-sD2BZaA","full_text":"@thenftattorney maybe i’m naive but seems like 99% of people employed in crypto aren’t trading on information they’re directly responsible for determining ","username":"SHL0MS","name":"𒐪","date":"Wed Jun 01 18:24:44 +0000 2022","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/FUL9HuJXoAcdKfN.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/lIGgpWXqnN","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"retweet_count":2,"like_count":25,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}”>

