👉 Background: OpenSea is the world's largest marketplace of non-fungible tokens, AKA NFTs. It was founded in 2017 and is now valued at an impressive US$13.3 billion... nearly double the value of Qantas 🤑.

👉 What happened: OpenSea's first hire on its product team (and now an ex-employee) has just been arrested for insider trading. Part of this person's job was selecting featured NFTs for OpenSea's front page. These featured NFTs would then see big price increases.

👉 What else: The employee decided to buy up NFTs before they were featured and sell them at 2-5x more. While NFTs may be new, insider trading isn't. The rules still apply, so this ex-employee is in biiig trouble.

🔔 What's the key learning?

💡Insider trading is when an employee uses information not available to the public, to buy or sell an asset or security. Historically, this happens primarily inside the share market.

💡Insider trading became illegal for shares in 1934 in the US, but it only became illegal for commodities (like gold or oil) in 2010. So as new asset classes emerge, it's interesting to see that insider trading laws are keeping up.

💡If anything, this case shows that even though the blockchain industry isn’t heavily regulated…foul play will STILL be sniffed out.