Former OpenSea Exec Found Guilty of Insider Trading of NFTs
Crypto is in the red across the board — with “ordinals” potentially tanking Bitcoin — a former OpenSea executive was found guilty of insider trading, a recent report looks favorably on the Metaverse in the next decade, Nreal is changing its name and may be announcing a new product soon. News in Brief from MetaVRse, Niantic, Felix and Paul, Solana, the Immerse Global Summit, and more.
An Eye on the Markets
Both Ethereum and Bitcoin have been trending down fairly consistently through the week, with both down in the neighborhood of 5% on the week. BTC heading back toward $27k, while ETH is around $1.8k.
Other projects are also down with very few exceptions. Some losses are small, though Shiba Inu, Hedera, Avalanche, and Polygon are all down over 10% on the week, with Cardano, Dogecoin, Cardano, and Chainlink not far behind.
An Eye on the Fed
There’s no word so far from the Securities and Exchange Commission who are supposed to provide guidance to Coinbase following a suit that Coinbase won last week. Of course, the SEC was given 10 days and they’ve still got a few hours, so maybe there will be news on this next week.
In other courtroom drama, a former OpenSea product manager was found guilty of insider trading after featuring NFT collections that he had invested in to artificially increase the prices before selling his holdings. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a one-off. It could have reaching implications in how NFT marketplaces toe the line in order to avoid similar crimes and lawsuits in the future.
Metaverse Markets
A recent study reportedly found that the Metaverse could contribute over 2% of the country’s GDP by 2035. While 2% doesn’t sound like much, that adds up to tens of billions of dollars.
Predictions about the size of the future Metaverse economy aren’t new. In fact, that’s part of what makes this recent study newsworthy. Some reporters have drawn attention to the fact that artificial intelligence is taking up a lot of the oxygen that used to go toward immersive tech. This report could be a fresh breeze in the sails of people who thought that the Metaverse had been completely forgotten.
Metaverse Money
Binance now supports the trading of “ordinals” — NFTs minted on Satoshis. The platform is not only the most recent, but probably the largest marketplace to do so.
While one of the larger criticisms of Bitcoin in the metaverse ecosystem is that it isn’t as versatile as tokens like Ethereum, some people in the Bitcoin community think that’s the way it should be. Some suggest that the ordinals boom is even a contributing factor to Bitcoin’s falling price as it results in higher transaction fees.
New Name, New Product
AR glasses manufacturer Nreal is reportedly changing its name to Xreal, apparently resulting from an out-of-court settlement with Epic Games over the similarity of “nreal” to “Unreal” — Epic’s game engine.
Patents have also come to light regarding “Beam” — apparently the first product to bear the Xreal branding. The device appears to be a sort of adapter allowing AR glasses to serve as virtual screens for a wide range of connected devices.
News in Brief
- Treedis launched a new app for more efficient workshopping of AR digital twins.
- Niantic’s highly anticipated AR pet simulator Peridot launched this week.
- Habytat also features virtual pets — and it’s trying to entice people to its recently launched platform with free plot and house NFTs.
- VR film makers Felix and Paul Studios released a documentary on the history of space travel.
- A closed beta period is open for the second major version of the MetaVRse engine.
- October dates have been set and preregistration is open for the Immerse Global Summit in Orlando.
- Solana is sourcing ideas for NFT profile pictures in an extremely time-limited “NFT Showdown.”