OpenSea Outs Employee For Insider Trading, Says NFTs Purchased Before Public Listing

The leading non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea has publicly accused one of its employees of insider trading.

What Happened: OpenSea learned that one of its employees "purchased items that they knew were set to display on our front page before they appeared there publicly," the company said in a Wednesday announcement.

The company described the event as "incredibly disappointing" and said "this behavior does not represent our values as a team."

OpenSea said the firm is "taking this very seriously" and reviewing the incident to fully understand it and decide the additional steps needed. Furthermore, the company has enacted two new policies. The first one is that team members cannot buy or sell from collections or creators that are being featured or promoted. The second new policy prohibits team members from using confidential information to sell or purchase any NFTs independent of their availability on OpenSea. 

The report follows a bug in OpenSea's smart contracts accidentally destroying at least 42 NFTs worth a minimum of $100,000 earlier this month.

In July, OpenSea raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the firm to a valuation of $1.5 billion.