OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces, has confirmed that its head of product, Nate Chastain, used insider knowledge to purchase NFTs that he knew were going to be displayed on the front page of OpenSea ahead of general release.

Arbitrum’s development team, Offchain Labs, assured users that funds were never at risk during a forty-five minute period of downtime at 10:14 ET on September 14th. However, users were unable to submit new transactions during the outage.

Popular cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, is seeking membership with the National Futures Association in a bid to offer derivatives, per an application with the National Futures Association that was dated September 15th.

Join us later today for a discussion featuring some of the leading institutional traders, asset managers and market makers in the crypto space, featuring speakers from CryptoCompare, CoinShares, FalconX and Flow Traders.

📅 Sept 16th, 5 PM BST / 12 PM EST 

🎟️ Deep Dive: Exploring The Depths Of Digital Asset Liquidity.

Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• OpenSea Executive Used Insider Knowledge To Buy NFTs
• Arbitrum’s Developers Assured ‘Funds Were Never At Risk’ During Downtime
• Coinbase Seeks Membership with National Futures Association
• Webinar: Institutional Traders Discuss Market Liquidity And More 📈

OpenSea Executive Used Insider Knowledge To Purchase NFTs

OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces, has confirmed that its head of product, Nate Chastain, used insider knowledge to purchase NFTs that he knew were going to be displayed on the front page of OpenSea ahead of general release. 

The accusations first arose on Twitter, with one user called ‘Zuwu’ saying that Chastain seems to be selling these pieces “shortly after the front-page-hype spike for profits.”

Yesterday, on September 15, OpenSea published a post confirming Chastain’s actions.

“Yesterday we learned that one of our employees purchased items that they knew were set to display on our front page before they appeared there publicly,” said OpenSea. “This is incredibly disappointing. We want to be clear that this behaviour does not represent our values as a team. We are taking this very seriously and are conducting an immediate and thorough review of this incident so that we have a full understanding of the facts and additional steps we need to take.”

Since the incident, OpenSea has rolled out new policies reiterating that team members can not buy or sell from collections whilst they are being promoted, nor use confidential information to purchase NFTs.

Arbitrum’s Developers Assured ‘Funds Were Never At Risk’ During Downtime

Arbitrum’s development team, Offchain Labs, assured users that funds were never at risk during a forty-five minute period of downtime at 10:14 ET on September 14th. However, users were unable to submit new transactions during the outage. 

Arbitrum is one of many solutions that is trying to solve Ethereum’s transaction bottleneck - an issue that has been widely criticised by many within the crypto community for being a major limitation of the network. Arbitrum is looking to solve this by using a transaction verification mechanism known as Optimistic Rollup. 

Offchain were quick to fix the Sequencer bug, outlining in their outage report that  “The root cause of the downtime was a bug causing the Sequencer to get stuck when it received a very large burst of transactions in a short period of time. The issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed.”

Arbitrum’s Sequencer is an optional feature of the Arbitrum layering solution that can be turned on or off whenever a user desires. The Sequencer guarantees the results of user transactions instantly, without needing to wait for block confirmations on Ethereum.

Coinbase Seeks Membership with National Futures Association

Popular cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, is seeking membership with the National Futures Association in a bid to offer derivatives, per an application with the National Futures Association that was dated September 15.

Coinbase tweeted: "[t]oday, Coinbase filed an application with the NFA to register as an FCM → Futures Commission Merchant. This is the next step to broaden our offerings and offer futures and derivatives trading on our platforms."

During an interview with The Block, Coinbase’s head of institutional sales, Brett Tejpaul, highlighted how derivatives, including futures, are part of the company's roadmap. Tejpaul specifically noted that "the formation of the derivative market, which then will include all the things I mentioned, plus derivatives, futures, options, swaps, structured products" will be part of a broader push from Coinbase to attract business from future clients.

Webinar: Institutional Traders Discuss Market Liquidity And More 📈

Do you want to learn all about digital asset liquidity from leading traders, asset managers & market makers? Then don't miss our latest virtual event - Deep Dive: Exploring The Depths Of Digital Asset Liquidity - starting today at 5 PM BST / 12 PM EST.

Join us for a great discussion with leading experts and learn:

• How order book and trade data can be used to assess exchange and market liquidity.
• If suspicious volumes and wash trading are as prevalent as they once were.
• The most important types of transaction cost that inform institutional trading strategies.
• If certain assets behave differently from a liquidity perspective across the wider crypto ecosystem.
• How digital asset markets, venues and trading will evolve over the next five years!

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