In May 2023, a jury convicted Nathaniel Chastain of wire fraud and money laundering related to his knowledge of which NFTs would be featured on the OpenSea website.
Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager of nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea, has appealed his conviction for wire fraud and money laundering related to insider trading.
In a Jan. 16 filing in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Chastain’s legal team claimed the former product manager was entitled to an acquittal because the U.S. government failed to prove that information related to NFTs on OpenSea qualified as property. According to his lawyers, the information he used to profit off NFTs featured on the OpenSea website “had no commercial value” to the platform and was not considered “protected property.”
“Not all confidential information is property,” said the appellate brief. “[C]onfidential information must have commercial value to its owner [...] The company’s business model was to earn revenue from commissions on NFT transactions conducted on its website, not to monetize Chastain’s ideas about which NFTs to feature.”
