One of the advantages of listing a coin is giving it exposure, most of these exchanges are regarded to be notable, prominent and trustworthy, so when coins are about to get listed, it creates this hype for the coin and gives the coin publicity. People tend to trade a coin or rather buy more of the coin when they get listed on crypto exchanges.This is probably because, they feel that prior to the listing of the coin, the devs must have passed through all the requirements needed for the coin to get listed. Besides, these exchanges don’t have a lot of records of scam coins on their platforms.
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Inside trading is something I am sure that most of these centralized exchanges do when they are about to list a coin secretly. They know the coin will pump due to the hype, so they buy it before the listing and wait for the pump, after pump, they sell, take profit and wait for the next one. Although, I don’t know if it’s illegal, but I don’t consider it morally right because that’s abuse of information and opportunity.
Sometime in 2021, I wrote a post about some guy named Nate Chastain who worked in opensea and did a lot of NFT inside trading. He buys these NFTs before listing, then sells them after listing thereby making a lot of money. The beauty of the blockchain is its transparency, some keen vigilant observants observed this and tweeted about it. This got Opensea’s attention into investigating the allegations and few days later, Opensea announced its dissociation with Nate Chastain.
Same allegations have been circulating about some ETH wallet who has been buying assets hours before coinbase listing. At first it was assumed to be coincidence but the track record was so clear that the wallet only bought assets Coinbase listed prior before listing.
Turns out that Nate Chastain who was once accused of inside trading NFTs on opensea was onboarded by Coinbase. Rumor has it that Nate Chastain could be the person inside trading on Coinbase because of his past accusation. The pattern looks clear and convincing that it could be him doing that. If he wasn’t accused of doing it on opensea May be the lime light wouldn’t be focused on him.
A response is expected from Coinbase to confirm the allegation or deny it. While this can be confirmed morally wrong some people see it to be an opportunity not worth being punished for, but I am sure that Coinbase should have a contract that prohibits such act.
Now people know the ETH address details, expect copy trading from the address. Lots of people will buy whatever assets the wallet buys.