Matt Levine, Columnist

You Can Insider Trade NFTs Now

Not legal advice. Also Builder.ai, Boring Co., Harvard and AI.

July 31, 2025 at 5:59 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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OpenSea was, and as far as I can tell still is, a big marketplace for trading nonfungible tokens. These tokens had a vogue in crypto a few years ago, when NFTs from popular series like Bored Ape Yacht Club would sell for millions of dollars. Anyone can create NFTs, and they generally have no intrinsic value; their value is strictly memetic. If a lot of people have heard of Bored Apes and think they are cool, then they will be valuable; if not, not.

Given this, OpenSea played an important role in the NFT boom. Specifically, OpenSea has a website, and it would feature some NFTs prominently on its homepage. People would go to OpenSea’s website to buy NFTs, and they would see the NFTs featured on the homepage, which would make them more likely to buy those NFTs, so those NFTs’ prices would go up. So if you could buy an NFT before it was featured on the homepage, and then sell it after it was featured, you could pretty reliably make money. It is hard to convey how weird 2021 was.