DOJ charges former Robinhood engineers over crypto insider trades

Prosecutors say the engineers used non-public knowledge of which tokens Robinhood was about to list, plus an early read on weak earnings, to place leveraged bets on Hyperliquid, a crypto exchange where contracts track prices like Robinhood Markets, Inc. (HOOD). It echoes the 2022 case against a Coinbase Global, Inc. (COIN) manager, the first crypto insider trading charge, and signals regulators now treat on-chain front-running as a crime.