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This periodic bulletin is designed to help companies identify important legal developments governing the use and acceptance of blockchain technology, smart contracts, and digital assets....more
In United States v. Chastain, No. 23-7038, 2025 WL 2165839 (2d Cir. July 31, 2025), the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated wire fraud and money laundering convictions in what the government...more
In two recent high-profile decisions, Chastain v. United States and Johnson v. United States, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed wire fraud convictions that were based on theories resembling insider...more
In United States v. Chastain, a split panel of the Second Circuit recently vacated the convictions of a former executive of an NFT marketplace who had been charged with misusing confidential information to trade NFTs for...more
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has vacated the conviction of Nathaniel Chastain, a former employee of non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea. Chastain had been convicted of wire fraud and money...more
On June 1, 2022, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York charged former OpenSea employee Nathaniel Chastain with wire fraud1 for an NFT “insider trading” scheme. At the time, we here at SKrypto asked:...more
On July 31, 2025, a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion vacating the wire fraud and money laundering convictions of a former manager of a marketplace for non-fungible...more
On May 3, 2023, a jury found Nathaniel Chastain, a former manager of OpenSea (a major NFT marketplace), guilty of wire fraud and money laundering in connection with his attempts to conceal his use of confidential business...more
Prosecution of executives for insider trading is not necessarily headline news – except when the prosecution involves the SEC wading deep into the waters of defining crypto as a security enroute to securing two guilty pleas. ...more
The Second Circuit held yesterday that a government agency’s nonpublic, pre-decisional regulatory information does not constitute “property” for purposes of the federal insider-trading and wire-fraud statutes. The decision...more
Federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York recently charged Nathan Chastain with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with a purported scheme to illegally profit from sales and purchases of...more
On July 21, 2022, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) each alleged insider trading violations against a former Coinbase employee, his brother, and another alleged acquaintance...more
On July 21, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced parallel civil and criminal actions against a former product manager at Coinbase...more
On July 21, 2022, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment charging Ishan Wahi (Wahi), a former product manager at a large cryptocurrency trading platform (the Platform) - along with his brother Nikhil Wahi...more
A few days ago, the SEC has charged a former employee of OpenSea (the largest NFT marketplace) In the first-ever digital asset indictment. SEC charged him with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with a scheme to...more
A product manager at OpenSea, a $13 billion online marketplace for non-fungible-tokens (“NFTs”), was indicted in the first-ever “insider-trading” action brought against a person using blockchain-based assets to allegedly...more
The recent indictment of an employee of OpenSea, a prominent NFT marketplace, highlights the risk of trading digital assets based on the improper use of confidential information, even where the digital asset is not a...more
On June 1, 2022, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced the indictment of former OpenSea employee Nathaniel Chastain for an NFT “insider trading” scheme. From at least June to...more
A former employee of OpenSea, the largest marketplace for the purchase and sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has been indicted and charged with wire fraud and money laundering allegedly in connection with actions he took...more
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has announced the unsealing of a first-of-its-kind indictment involving a digital asset “insider trading” scheme. The indictment charges Nathaniel...more
Reaffirming DOJ’s focus on digital assets, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York today charged a defendant, for the first time ever, with insider trading in non-fungible tokens (NFTs). ...more