Ex-OpenSea Executive Nate Chastain Gets 3 Months in Prison for Insider Trading

coindesk.com

11 points·TuringNYC··8 comments

Somewhat related, OpenSea recently announced they will no longer enforce the mandatory payment to artists when an NFT is traded, removing one of the main incentives to publish this way: https://hyperallergic.com/840325/the-only-good-part-of-nfts-...

Wait, I thought that mechanism is built in to the contract and not the exchange platform? Am I understanding it wrong?

Smoke and mirrors. The exchange platform holds keys that allow them to modify the behavior of the contract.

This is because NFTs don't actually understand the concept of a "sale". They can be transferred to another wallet, but this wallet may belong to the same person as the previous wallet in which case paying royalties wouldn't make much sense.

Paying royalties is entirely optional. What's built into the contract is a calculation of a value for royalties to be paid, but it's up to the marketplace to use it. Other platforms already ignored it.

Nate's actual conviction was for fraud and money laundering, not insider trading... yet they keep framing it as an insider trading conviction when it has absolutely no bearing here. The guy did some sketchy stuff at a privately held company. Normally being fired would be enough, but he's clearly being made an example of, and a poor one at that when the DOJ is completely sleeping on folks running multi-million dollar grifts.

So what? Fraud and money laundering are illegal too. Make him an example, who cares. Just because the coverage of it frames it a certain way or that other people are doing worse things doesn't move me at all.

The DOJ itself is framing it as Insider Trading, even when that's not what they charged him with. It's disingenuous and fear mongering.

50k or 3 months jail.. can't blame him for trying

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