Binance to Purchase Voyager plus Ryan Reynolds Reads Ad for Mint Mobile by ChatGPT
This week continued and accelerating green in charts have some calling for the end of Crypto’s Bear Market. Meanwhile, the DOJ looks at a major Solana company as the SEC fails to block a Binance acquisition. As Binance looks to buy up more companies, Coinbase looks to lay off employees. Then, Major Marketers use AI, followed by News Briefs from the XRA, Meta, Pico, and Ryan Reynolds reads ad for Mint Mobile.
An Eye on the Charts
Major coins continued last week’s upward growth with greater vigor this week. Bitcoin went back above $18k, while Ethereum saw double-digit percentage growth to get back above $1.3k. Does this mean that the bear market is over? Don’t start celebrating yet. BTC briefly topped $18k about a month ago before falling back down. ETH was briefly above $1.4k – prices not seen since early November.
A number of other projects are doing better this week as well. Polygon was among a number of tokens achieving over 10% growth after announcing a partnership with Mastercard. Cardano was among a number of tokens seeing over 20% growth on the week. Also on that list, Avalanche, a project that reportedly partnered with Amazon to scale blockchain for governments and large companies.
An Eye on the Fed
Not all is necessarily good news for Solana. The Department of Justice is reportedly investigating the founders of Saber Labs. Saber Labs is not the same as Solana, it’s a Solana exchange. However, the founders of the exchange may have used false names to found other exchanges and artificially increased the apparent value of Solana by moving tokens back and forth between the companies.
In other news, Binance will be allowed to purchase Voyager despite a filed objection by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Markets and Exchanges
The Voyager purchase isn’t the only big news from Binance this week. The company is also looking at adding another 15 to 30 percent more employees over the course of the year. That may sound ambitious, but it’s actually a significant slowdown. The company is believed to have almost tripled its employee count over the course of 2022.
Not all crypto companies and exchanges are looking so hot. Fellow giant Coinbase is reportedly looking to cut 20% of its positions after having taken a similar action this summer. The company is reportedly looking to reduce expenses to weather crypto downturn.
All Eyes on AI
This has been a big week for AI. While many of us have been increasingly playing with models for at least a few months now, some big name brands put the tech to use this week including marketing agency Codeword who onboarded “AI Interns.” We also got to see Ryan Reynolds read a Mint Mobile commercial written by ChatGPT.
News in Brief
- The XR Association voiced support for a bill that would help colleges fund programs giving students hands-on experience with XR for remote support and on-site training.
- Meta is sunsetting the original Quest, according to an email reportedly sent to Quest users and shared by Leo Leiriel on Twitter.
- The news is in the original post, but the comments are a trove of opinion and insights regarding the breakneck pace of hardware advancement in the XR industry today and how it affects consumers.
- Speaking of Meta, the company announced the release of a number of new games including Arcade Legend, Maskmaker, and Gods of Gravity. Some of those titles may be familiar because they aren’t “new” so much as “new to Quest,” illustrating the platform’s growing diversity.
- Pico also got new options as events platform VRROOOM entered an alpha on the hardware series exclusive store.