Product Lead Of OpenSea Accused Of Using Insider Knowledge To Profit

The Product Lead of OpenSEA NFT marketplace has been accused of using insider knowledge to profit from the NFT sales before they were released and sold them after the front-page hype spike to make fast profits so let’s read more in our latest cryptocurrency news.

The OpenSea product lead has been accused of insider trading and buying NFTs before they were released so he could sell them and make quick profits. The employee was caught doing insider trading before the NFTs were dropped on the platform so shortly after, the project published a blog post and admitted the wrongdoing. The users on Twitter accused Nate Chastain, the product lead of OpenSea, of using secret ETH burner wallets to purchase these NFTs before they were unloaded on the front page. What made him being caught was the mistake of sending the profits to his own public address. The transactions were found by a user on Twitter who revealed that Chastain was doing this for a while and managed to make 19 ETH in total or about $66,911 USD.

Found a way to upload the files sent to me, these are not my work and I’m working on confirming the validity of them myself, but as you can imagine things are wildly busy at the moment lolhttps://t.co/rrkVOugy77

— Zuwu🟩 👻🎃🦇 (@ZuwuTV) September 15, 2021

Chastain is the owner of CryptoPunk #3501 and purchased for 26.98 ether. The NFT revealed his ETH address to the community and allowed anyone to see his transactions. OpenSea confirmed the allegations in a blog post and said:

“This is incredibly disappointing. We want to be clear that this behavior does not represent our values as a team. 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.”

OpenSea didn’t disclose the status of Chastain’s employment with the company but this is not the first time that the same person was accused of insider trading. Chastain admitted to buying in-demand artwork by an artist and recieved harsh criticism from the community. OpenSea was the leading NFT marketplace for collectors and the platform recorded $1 billion in trading volume but this event opened even more criticism once again with many users calling out centralization and market manipulation besides lack of transparency from the NFT collectors.  At least $100K in NFTs were lost due to a bug found in the marketplace but while the issue was patched, the users were still not able to get back their NFTS.

Source: https://www.dcforecasts.com/altcoin-news/product-lead-of-opensea-accused-of-using-insider-knowledge-to-profit/