The NFT case Insiderhandel of the former OpenSA leadership continues

The NFT case Insiderhandel of the former OpenSA leadership continues

Nate Chastain, the former Openea employee who is accused of an insider-NFT trade system, could not convince a judge to dismiss his charges and continue the case.

The Ministry of Justice (DOJ) complained to Chastain in June for transfer fraud and money laundering because of a series of supposedly shady business, which took place during his term as product manager of OpenSea between January and September 2021.

The authorities say that Chastain used confidential information about which NFTS would be presented on the OpenSea homepage, and used this knowledge to buy dozens of tokens, just before they appeared.

chastain then benefited from the sale of these NFTs, while according to Doj, he used anonymous digital wallets and accounts on Openea to hide his movements. He allegedly generated at least 19 ETH ($ 25,500, current prices) by trade, based on information from his well -known wallets.

chastain resigned from OpenSea after being suspected of embezzling insider information in September 2021. Back then a Number Dealer pointed out on Twitter that a chastager belonging to a chastag was routinely at the center of transactions with NFTS that appeared on the portal of OpenSea.

Reuters Eleven different occasions secretly bought 45 NFTs. In such a case, his purchase and sale of the "Spectrum of a Ramification Theory" on September 14, 2021 more than quadrupled his profits from this special trade.

chastain tried to drop the indictment, with his lawyer argued that the existence of securities or goods trade was an essential element of every insider trade. And nfts are neither of them, they claimed. But this dispute did not convince the case of the case.

The lawyers also claimed that the government could not prove any allegations of money, since the Chasto transactions in question were carried out on the Ethereum blockchain and were therefore "completely visible to the public".

chastain case not exactly "insiderhandel"

im rejection of the application to be released on October 21, said Jesse Furman, Chastain was not charged because of insiderhandels in the "classic sense of the word".

He is accused of transfer fraud, which does not refer to securities or goods and instead refers to "obtaining money or property through false or fraudulent claims". So his argument was "completely unfounded," said the judge.

Furman referred to another case as a reference point to make it clear that Chastain's lawyer had not put up a solid argument. In this case, a reporter of Wall Street Journal received a program with dealers to share the timing and the content of a column so that they could make profits.

"The columnist and the dealers were charged and convicted both the securities fraud as well as postal and transfer fraud," said the judge. They had argued to remove the convictions on the grounds that the information in question was not "property". However, the court decided that the publication schedule and the content of the newspaper column were owned by property in the sense of the wire fraud law.

"No court has proposed, let alone decided that a conviction in such a case requires trade in securities or raw materials," said the judge.

The judge, however, admitted that the term "insider trade" could be misleading in the case of Chastain. The appropriate means, he said, would be to delete this sentence from the indictment. This would also prevent the government from using it in court.

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The contribution of the NFT case "Insiderhandel" of the former Openea manager is not continued.