Tag Archives: Michael Nonaka

First Digital Asset Insider Trading Indictment

by Arlo Devlin Brown, Nihkil K. Gore, Gerald Hodgkins, Nancy Kestenbaum, Jeremy Newell, Michael Nonaka, Adrian J. Perry, D. Jean Veta, and Juliana Moraes Liu

A former non-fungible token (“NFT”) marketplace employee is facing prosecution by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York on one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering, in an indictment unsealed on June 1, 2022. The Department of Justice (“DOJ”) alleges that the employee perpetrated a scheme to use confidential information from his employer about which NFTs would be featured on the marketplace’s front page to commit insider trading in the featured NFTs for his personal financial gain.

According to DOJ, this is the first insider trading case involving digital assets, and it notably relies on a theory that can be applied to a wide range of digital assets, whether or not the assets are regulated as securities.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Proposed Rules on Small Business Data Collection: Nine Things To Know

by David Stein, Eric Mogilnicki, Jeremy Newell, Michael Nonaka, and Andrew Smith 

On Wednesday, September 1, 2021, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“Bureau”) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking for proposed rules that would require creditors to collect and report data about lending to small businesses, focusing on minority-owned and women-owned small businesses (the “Proposed Rules”). The Bureau issued the Proposed Rules to implement Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2011. Section 1071 amended the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (“ECOA”) to create a mandatory data collection and reporting requirement for business lending to promote the ECOA’s fair lending objectives. In July 2021, the Bureau committed to issuing the Proposed Rules no later than September 30, 2021, as part of a settlement agreement reached in a lawsuit brought by consumer advocates in 2019 regarding the delayed issuance of rules to implement Section 1071. Comments on the Proposed Rules are due 90 days after publication in the Federal Register.

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