MINING BAN: Iran is banning authorized crypto mining until March 6 in an attempt to save power and avoid blackouts this winter, and it is renewing a crackdown on unlicensed mining. Previously, Iran banned all crypto mining this past summer to reduce the burden on the national power grid. An unusually dry spring has left Iran struggling with hydropower shortages.

PLAY TO EARN: Thetan Arena, a “play-to-earn” video game, or those that offer cryptocurrency rewards like Axie Infinity, has seen tremendous – if volatile – growth. The “e-sport multiplayer online battle arena,” or MOBA, game launched late last month and claims to have over twice as many users as Axie Infinity while its Thetan Gem (THG) governance token currently has a market value of more than $500 million.

GOING ALGORITHMIC: Prominent VCs and investors Amber Group, Alameda Research and the DJ Steve Aoki have invested $6 million in Sperax, as the team builds out a new yield-paying, dollar-pegged, algorithmic stablecoin. Launched Dec. 23, USDs will live on the Ethereum scaler Arbitrum and pay yield to those who post collateral – beginning with USDC, USDT and ETH – that backs the asset. The project plans to decentralize over time with the eventual launch of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to oversee development and rely more on algorithms than collateral.

META ETF: ProShares has filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an exchange-traded fund (ETF) focused on the metaverse. In a filing Wednesday, ProShares said the “Metaverse Theme ETF” would track the performance of the Solactive Metaverse Theme Index, which includes tech giants Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) and Nvidia, companies that are supposedly exposed to the metaverse industry.

NFT AIRDROP: In a remarkable display of the power of airdrops in community formation, a new token for the new OpenDAO reached a peak market capitalization of over a quarter-billion dollars in just four days. On Christmas, anyone who ever purchased an NFT on OpenSea, about 850,000 potential addresses, awoke to an airdrop of SOS tokens. About 275,000 addresses have claimed the tokens for a project that’s unaffiliated with OpenSea, lacks a road map and may contain security vulnerabilities (including a potential rug pull by founders, who reported control 50% of all SOS tokens).

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Korean crypto exchange Coinone will no longer allow withdrawals to unverified external wallets (The Block)
China’s crypto crackdown sparks Thai crypto-mining boom (Al Jazeera)
The new Gas Dao is airdropping tokens to anyone who spent more than $1,559 on Ethereum gas fees (referencing EIP 1559, which was meant to lower the cost to use Ethereum) (Decrypt)
Aave is following MakerDAO is trying to bring “real world assets” to DeFi (Decrypt)
The Association for Crypto Journalists and Researcher’s (ACJR) new board, and year-end highlight (Substack)
“OpenDAO's SOS airdrop last week has since lost its steam, more than halving in price despite a wave of partnerships and exchange listings” (Decrypt)

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NEAR: Three Dominant Trends in the Future of Blockchain Gaming

This year, OP Games, a Web 3 gaming arcade platform built on Near, changed how users buy, own and trade in-game assets. Unlike typical AAA games, which are produced by major publishers, and mobile games, which often sandbox digital assets on their platforms, OP Games is turning them into collectible non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which players can own outside of the OP Games platform.

OP Games also brought fractionalized NFTs to its gaming arcade, which allows players and fans to co-own the projects they love.