On Wednesday the crypto marketplace OpenSea released a statement in which they addressed an event in which one of their executives profited from insider trading.
The statement by OpenSea revealed that one of their employees had been accused of profiting and leveraging inside information, the specific nature of which was revealed in the OpenSea blog.
“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. This is incredibly disappointing. We want to be clear that this behavior does not represent our values as a team.”
While it seems like there were no previous policies in place restricting the use of confidential information to buy and sell NFTs, now, according to the post, OpenSea is set to implement new policies in order to avoid another incident of this nature. The following policies are to be implemented:
“OpenSea team members may not buy or sell from collections or creators while we are featuring or promoting them (e.g. on our home page); and OpenSea team members are prohibited from using confidential information to purchase or sell any NFTs, whether available on the OpenSea platform or not.”
OpenSea is the most popular NFT marketplace in use, and was recently valued at $1.5 billion following a $100 million Series B from Andreessen Horowitz.
Prior to OpenSea revealing their internal investigation, Twitter user @Zuwutv tweeted about an employee using secret wallets to benefit from front page NFT drops, tweeting:
“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?”
The following day released the aforementioned blog post, and set out their new policies regarding the buying and selling of NFTs while they are promoting them.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
