

"I think that regulators don't have their eye on the prize and pretty much everyone gets away with this," he said. Regulators don't need their powers expanded to be able to combat this sort of fraud and misleading statements," Sobrado said. "There's a lot of chat about regulation right now, but what a lot of these bad actors are doing is clearly against the law right now. London-based fintech data analyst Boaz Sobrado said the OpenSea scandal makes two things clear: The transparency of the blockchain makes it a powerful tool to monitor nefarious behavior, given that all trades are public and recorded forever, and, crucially, that "regulators aren't doing much" with that information. They aren't officially considered securities, nor is there much by way of legal precedent around digital assets as a whole, so NFT-related insider trading doesn't appear to be illegal. NFTs, in particular, exist in a legal gray zone. The entire episode lays bare the regulatory gap that exists across large swaths of the wider crypto ecosystem.

The company wrote that it has implemented two new employee policies, including banning OpenSea team members from buying or selling from collections or creators while they are being featured or promoted by the company, as well as barring staff from "using confidential information to purchase or sell any NFTs, whether available on the OpenSea platform or not." However, that is changing, starting today. Despite the billions of dollars worth of ether trading hands on the platform, the start-up seems to have been relatively lax with respect to restrictions around employees using privileged information to invest in NFTs. OpenSea logged a record $3.4 billion in transaction volume last month, according to Dune Analytics.

CNBC did not independently confirm this figure, and OpenSea told CNBC it is not revealing how much the employee profited from the plan. Chinese blockchain and crypto news platform 8btc traced the sales allegedly tied to Chastain and his front-running scheme, noting a collective profit of 18.875 ether, or about $67,000 at today's price.
