OpenSea Confirms Employee Insider Trading Incident
OpenSea has announced new employee policies after acknowledging an insider trading incident involving one of its employees.
While the company did not name the employee involved, OpenSea head of product Nate Chastain was accused by Twitter user @ZuwuTV on Tuesday of front-running sales on the largest NFT marketplace.
In a viral Twitter thread, the user pointed to a series of transactions that allegedly show Chastain purchasing NFTs directly prior to their front page listing on OpenSea, then selling them for profit following their associated price rise.
According to Chinese crypto news platform 8btc, Chastain made a total profit of 18.875 ETH ($67,000) from the transactions under scrutiny. nft now has not independently verified this figure.
While Chastain has yet to make a public statement, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer confirmed the incident via an official statement on their blog and promised a full investigation.
“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,” the announcement reads. “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 third party review of this incident so that we have a full understanding of the facts and additional steps we need to take.”
Devin Finzer via official statement
Under the newly announced policies, OpenSea employees are prohibited from buying or selling from collections or creators while they are being promoted or featured by the platform, as well as prohibited from using confidential information to purchase or sell any NFTs, regardless of whether they are on OpenSea or another platform.