- OpenSea manager sentenced for insider trading, his lawyers are allegedly preparing to appeal the sentence.
- The Court is reportedly still considering how Chastain will pay back his ill-gotten ETH funds.
- Coinbase employee charged for using confidential company information for his profits.
A former manager at OpenSea, Nathaniel Chastain, has now been given the order to surrender himself to the authorities by November 2nd after he received a conviction for wire fund and money laundering related to his role in insider trading on OpenSea.
A federal judge sentenced the former OpenSea employee to three months imprisonment for wire fraud and money laundering.
The news was reported in an August 22 announcement from the United States Department of Justice. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Nathaniel had been sentenced to a three-year prison stint and another three months of home confinement. He added three years of supervised release while ordering the former product manager to pay a $50,000 fine and a forfeiture of his ill-gotten Ether from the trades of NFTs.
In a news report by Inner Press, Chastain is required to surrender himself to authorities by November. However, his lawyers plan to appeal the court verdict and request bail for their client.
The judge who ruled over the case added that Respect for the law and general deterrence are vital punishment factors. However, Nathaniel is a first-time offender, hence the mitigating circumstances. The former OpenSea employee still has a promising future.
The former product manager at OpenSea had been accused of insider trading, using his post at OpenSea to profit off NFT sales, and was also convicted by a jury on May 3 of wire fraud and money laundering. While he was a product manager for OpenSea, he had the power of choosing which NFTs would get featured on the platform’s website, so Chastain purchased 45 NFTs before they got featured on the website and then resold them after they got featured.
An order from Judge Jesse Furman on August 22 stated that the court would have to consider if Chastain would be required to forfeit any ETH he got from his illegal trading scheme or the U.S. dollar equivalent of the ETH. This recent sentencing could be close to the case since Chastain was charged and arrested by U.S. authorities in June 2022.
In another separate case of an employee of a well-known company being charged, a former product manager for Coinbase, Ishan Wahi, was recently sentenced to two years imprisonment in May for using confidential information at Coinbase to gain profit off the new token listing.
Conclusion
His brother Nikhil and another associate, Sameer Ramani, were also charged in the same case for their role in the fraud scheme, with the former pleading guilty to the charges laid against him in September 2022, he received a ten months prison sentence, and at the time, Sameer Ramani was still on the run.
