The next 12 months will show whether blockchain games have sufficient drawing power on the Epic Games Store, one of PC’s largest online gaming marketplaces.
Why it matters: For all their funding and fanfare, crypto-based games have been blocked from or kept off most traditional gaming marketplaces. That has left the store run by the makers of Fortnite as one of their largest proving grounds.
U.S. Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter told a crowd at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that his agency is paying close attention to the hot field of artificial intelligence.
What they're saying: "We use the term [artificial intelligence] as if it's a very narrow category, but these are just tools," Kanter said during a taping for the New York Times' "Hard Fork" podcast.
Startup CEO Eliza Arnold was in Mexico on a previously planned vacation when she got the first notes Thursday morning suggesting she might want to move some of her funds out of Silicon Valley Bank.
Quickly, the cautious advice turned to urgent conversations that dominated her text messages, a number of WhatsApp threads, as well as several founder Slack groups she's in.
"It went from 0-60 basically over a Thursday night," said Arnold, co-founder of Arnie, which helps manage 401K programs for startups and investors. "By Friday morning it was pure chaos."
The lightning collapse of Silicon Valley Bank Friday raised the specter of a broad tech-industry crash for the first time since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.
Driving the news: That threat, which loomed all weekend as legions of the startups that made up the bank's clientele worried about meeting next week's payrolls, receded after the federal government intervened Sunday to backstop depositors' assets even over the $250,000 FDIC threshold.
Some electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers are eliminating AM radios from their cars, which government officials fear could put people at risk in an emergency.
Why it matters: AM radio is one of the critical ways that federal, state, and local officials communicate with the public during natural disasters and other emergencies.
Federal banking regulators took aggressive new actions aimed at preventing depositors in failed Silicon Valley Bank from losing money— and at trying to prevent its downfall from unleashing a nationwide run across the banking system.
Why it matters: The extraordinary actions, using tools last deployed in the early days of the pandemic and in the 2008 global financial crisis, are an attempt to avert a broad banking crisis triggered by a run on the bank.
New York-based Signature Bank, a key bank to the cryptocurrency industry, was shut down by regulators on Sunday, according to a joint statement from U.S. regulators. The statement also detailed actions aimed at stemming broader fallout from the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.
State of play: All depositors at Signature, the third bank to shutter in a matter of days, will be made whole under the same systemic risk exception that allowed that outcome for Silicon Valley Bank customers.
All the pieces are in place for the Oscars to make a comeback on Sunday. But if a slate of popular movies and the spark from last year's controversial show can't rescue its ratings, then this may be its last gasp of relevance instead.
Why it matters: Major awards shows like the Oscars and Emmys have long been big business for broadcast TV networks — but their importance has been dwindling alongside their viewership.
