OpenSea fires employee implicated in insider trading

NFT-marketplace OpenSea has terminated the employment of an employee involved in insider trading. This is stated in the blog of the company.

“Today you can find 20 million NFTs on OpenSea. We owe this growth to the active community of creators and collectors, […] and we have an obligation to promote it forward responsibly and conscientiously,” the marketplace’s representatives said.

According to them, the employee’s conduct ran counter to the company’s stance, and he was dismissed from his role.

OpenSea’s statement does not explicitly name the individual. Earlier, a Twitter user accused OpenSea’s Chief Product Officer Nate Chastain of manipulation. He allegedly used information about front-page placements of tokens on the homepage for his own gain.

Hey @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?

— ZuwuTV.eth 👻🎃🦇 (@ZuwuTV) September 14, 2021

Following this, OpenSea launched an internal investigation. The company also changed its rules for employees regarding token purchases.

As of this article, Chastain updated his Twitter profile, stating that he no longer works at OpenSea. The parties did not comment on the situation.

One member of the crypto community wrote that Chastain’s profit from confirmed trades amounted to 19 ETH (roughly $67,400 at the current rate).

Looks like Nate traded 8-figs of OpenSea equity for 19 ETH on frontrun jpegs, nice job bruv pic.twitter.com/ZzU850FYJB

— cobie (@CryptoCobain) September 16, 2021

At the end of August, Chastain said there was a staffing shortage at OpenSea and asked for help finding specialists. According to him, 37 employees at the marketplace handle 98% of NFT trading volume. The tweet has since been deleted.

As reported, the leading Ethereum Name Service developer Nick Johnson lost access to the oldest decentralized domain name in the form of a non-fungible token, which due to an error ended up in the OpenSea burn address. The bug affected no fewer than 42 NFTs worth 28.44 ETH.

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