Devin Finzer, CEO of popular non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea, has told Decrypt the fired employee's actions on the platform have been wrongly classified as insider trading. He has explained:
"We don't view NFTs as financial assets, so that does not apply. That's a very specific term for a very specific thing."
OpenSea recently fired an employee for allegedly taking advantage of insider information.
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While the press release did not explicitly mention the name of the employee in question, the crypto community suspected it was the company's product manager, Nate Chastain.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stipulates that insider trading is the buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, on the basis of material, nonpublic information about the security.
Finzer has acknowledged that while the former OpenSea employee's actions do not meet this definition, they could undermine customer confidence in the platform. He added:
"This was a relatively small thing that was done by an employee, we took action, that employee then resigned due to this. But we are putting in place more rigorous policies around the people who work at OpenSea and want to be able to participate in the NFT market."