🤡 OpenSea Employee Gets 40 Years In Jail Time For Insider Trading With NFTs
gm frens 🧞♀️
We had better days in the space. Those huge spikes (all green-ish)..oh boy, have not had that feeling since forever 🫠. We have seen an overall decrease on interest in crypto and NFTs. At least that’s what Google says. Overall trend is going down for both.
For crypto as we can see below, there was a spike of interest 📈 on May this year, all this because of the Luna fall which we covered in our previous newsletter. While interest in NFTs is pretty much at the same level it was early October last year.
This makes me believe that the entire NFT space is mostly built in hype and FOMO. It is not about the art or the community. I have been around projects enough to know that community sticks around as long as they are making money. The moment it starts going down, they move on onto the next project. There is no such thing as long term investment in the space. Everything is a potential for flip. 🤗
OpenSea traded volume has been staying pretty much at the same levels for the last couple of months. Currently sitting at 1.8 million ETH ($3.3 billion 🤯) traded volume during the month of May.
However, considering all those, I still believe that NFTs and crypto are here to stay with us. In bear times, the one who benefit the most are the ones who keep building. 🤙
Btw, we learned that there are only 4k active developers on Ethereum blockchain 👨💻. That is extremely low number. And a really good opportunity about those who are interested in the space.
I have been working on preparing a doc ‘Steps To Become a Web3 Developer 📝’ and should be sending out by the end of this month. This doc is meant to serve you the sources as well as the route you can take to become a web3 developer faster. Obviously, having some experience in the web2 space would be helpful, but I will consider that everyone is starting from scratch so there will be learning resources from entry-expert level.
If interested to receive a draft of it, email us at newsletter@web3lunch.com 🤓
🤡 OpenSea Employee Gets 40 Years In Jail Time For Insider Trading With NFTs
Not sure if anyone remembers this from last year, but basically an employee (Nathaniel Chastian) from OpenSea was trading on insider information. He is getting 40 years in prison for doing that 😈.
If you are not familiar with this case, here's what happened..📜
OpenSea is an NFT marketplace where people trade NFTs on secondary market. On their homepage site they had a specific section where they would feature notable drops. Whatever would get featured there, prices for those NFTs would go up more than 5x. 🤑
Chastian was working for OpenSea at that time. He was responsible for selecting upcoming NFTs which would be featured on the OpenSea’s homepage 👹.
So he would buy those NFTs before featuring them in homepage (using anonymous digital currency wallets and anonymous accounts on OpenSea), feature them on homepage, and then sell them for a profit of at least 2-5 times more the price initially he paid for 💩.
All this happened from June 2021 till September 2021. Eventually, later on got caught and was fired. He is charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison ✌️.
Although web3 space is all about decentralization (i.e. being decentralized and not government regulated), a move like this is really welcomed, it brings back the trust in the space. Hopefully we will see more cases like this in the near future.🙏
Here is the Press Release, if you want to check it out.
📄 How to read a smart contract
There is this twitter thread from @cantino.eth on how to read a smart contract. Definitely worth reading. Also, worth following him as he seems to be really knowledgeable on the space 🧠.