The Justice Department charged a former employee of an NFT marketplace with fraud and money laundering in what prosecutors said was the first case to involve insider trading of the digital tokens.
An indictment unsealed Wednesday in New York charged Nathaniel Chastain, a 31-year-old former product manager at the online marketplace OpenSea, with using inside information to profit on NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, that were to be featured on his employer’s home page. Mr. Chastain was arrested Wednesday morning and later pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in a Manhattan federal court. A federal magistrate judge set his release at a $100,000 bond and ordered him to surrender his passport and not to contact current or former OpenSea employees.
