IMO, I think the way he was publicly lambasted and fired was punishment enough. Not to mention that shortly after, people were calling for him to return to OpenSea, because they were struggling without him for a hot minute.
I agree what he did was stupid and wrong, but I think he's the wrong person for the DOJ to throw the book at. They are only targeting him, because this was low hanging fruit due to the public outcry around this incident.
Disagree with most of this. It couldn't be more clearly textbook insider trading. He wouldn't have bought the NFTs and then immediately sold them for 5x profits if he didn't know OpenSea would be featuring them.
>I think he's the wrong person for the DOJ to throw the book at
Who cares if other people have done worse? When you break the law you should face consequences.
our realization is that we don't really have laws to cover this. insider trading is exclusively a securities law violation, which requires securities to have been traded. the NFTs in question are not securities and the actions around them are not being prosecuted as such. the remaining laws the prosecutors came up with are such a stretch that it seems like a waste of public resources, although "wire fraud" is sufficiently broad enough it may still be either kind of weak, or, not the expansion we want.
Case in point, "wire fraud" is typically a tacked on charge, in addition to another charge. and "money laundering" is also a tacked on charge, that requires an illicit origin, not just the action of obfuscation or movement of money. So they have to tie a couple things together solely because "we don't like what happened", but it may be the wrong authority to deal consequence.
It has nothing to do with a public understanding or a legal understanding of insider trading, because that's not what he was charged with, despite his trades being the catalyst for this indictment. semantics, but relevant semantics. you can insider trade everything except securities. you can have a market advantage on spot commodities, real estate, trading cards, you name it. but yes its typically a form of fraud when you can be proven to have created more demand than was really there + trading on that + when your employer has entrusted you not to do that. there are many circumstances where this would all be a non-case.
