Coachella returns to Fortnite
Coachella returns to Fortnite offering free rewards to users. (Charlie Intel)
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Fortnite Celebrates Coachella while OpenSea Manager on Trial for Insider Trading

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Our eye on the markets, more from embattled SEC chair Gary Gensler, a former OpenSea manager on trial for insider trading, Hedera updates, Fortnite celebrates Coachella, Sensorium Galaxy launches an Ambassador Program, and news in brief from AT&T, the VR Awards, Zappar and more.

An Eye on the Markets

Major coins started the week relatively flat before seeing significant gains and almost equally significant losses later in the week. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are now within 3% of where they were last week with Bitcoin around $29k and Ethereum around $1.9k. Other major projects followed a similar trajectory for drastic weekly charts that largely end within spitting distance of where they started.

An Eye on the Fed

Coinbase is suing the Securities and Exchange Commission in an attempt to make it better outline the rules for cryptocurrency. The SEC in general and chairman Gary Gensler in particular have recently come under fire for prosecuting cryptocurrency firms for operating outside of regulations without being clear on which regulations cryptocurrencies should operate within.

After failing to specify whether cryptocurrencies constitute securities, commodities, or something else during a house committee hearing last week, Gensler seems to have found his voice on Twitter. In a brief video shared on the platform, Gensler said that crypto is a kind of “investment contract” — a stance which assumes that holders expect a return from others’ work, which is still debatable in some cases.

Meanwhile, a former product manager of the NFT trading platform OpenSea is on trial for insider trading. Nathaniel Chastain allegedly “featured” NFT collections to artificially increase price and demand before selling his own NFTs from those collections. Also this week, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation shared a report on how NFT regulation can balance safety and innovation.

How Is Hedera?

Hedera, and the HBAR token, are powered not by a blockchain, but by a “hashgraph.” The Hedera Hashgraph was updated this week. While it was expected that the update may cause temporary network disruption, the update was successfully completely on schedule.

What did it do to the price of HBAR? Not much. The token largely followed the trends outlined above: despite rises and falls, the token remains within 2% of where it was last week trading at around a nickel.

Music in the Metaverse

Fortnite is celebrating Coachella. For the course of the in-person music festival, gamers have the opportunity to attend events and beat challenges in the Fortnite virtual world that will win them limited skins, emotes, items, and lobby tracks.

Join the SENSO Army

The blockchain powered virtual world Sensorium Galaxy launched a new ambassadors program. Ambassadors need to follow Sensorium on Discord and Twitter to get into the program with admittedly non-specified benefits.

Having different ranks requires other achievements like connecting a wallet, having the Senso tag in your social media bios, holding set amounts of tokens, or having set numbers of followers.

News in Brief