Your weekly Crypto, NFT & Metaverse readings 🚀

Vol 21–20th December — 26th December 2021

Rizvi Haider
6 min readDec 26, 2021

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This 21st Vol of the weekly crypto newsletter is the last one of the year 2021. What a year it has been for Crypto! In January the total crypto market cap was at around 650 billion and in November we hit $ 3 billion. This year’s themes were NFTs and the Metaverse, the rise of new layer 1 protocols like Solana and Avalanche and the launch of Ethereum scaling solutions. To build your investment thesis for 2022, it will be important to understand where the trend is going, what problems need solutions in Web3 and where smart money is flowing. I will share my predictions for 2022 in a separate post that may help you to shape your investment strategy. I hope everyone had a relaxing Christmas eve with family and friends and I wish everyone a great start into the year 2022.

🪙 Crypto Market News

Bitcoin miners generated more than $15 billion in revenue during 2021. Bitcoin miners made more than $15 billion in revenue over the course of 2021. The estimate represents a year-over-year increase of 206%. It should be noted that the estimate is premised on the notion that mining companies sell their accrued digital assets to pay for electrical power and other resources; some miners hold on to some of their mined coins. 📰 TheBlockCrypto

SWIFT in tokenized asset pilot with Clearstream, Northern Trust, SETL. In the first quarter of 2022, payment network SWIFT plans to run innovation pilots to explore interoperability in the tokenized asset market. Participants include Clearstream, Northern Trust, Citi-backed enterprise blockchain firm SETL, and other industry players. 📰 Ledgerinsights

Dapper, CoinFund back ‘SPACE’ Metaverse Play with $7M raise. SPACE, a virtual world for arts and commerce, has raised $7 million from Dapper Labs, CoinFund, Animoca Brands and other investors. SPACE will use the funding to build and join various metaverses into one parallel society and “build the economic backbone of the metaverse,” according to a press release. 📰 Coindesk

Compound DAO Uses Public Bidding Process To Hire Security Auditor. OpenZeppelin will take on the unusual role of an on-call security auditor for a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), available to monitor changes to the smart contracts and to its governance system, following a major bug in Sept. in how Compound distributed its governance token, COMP. The company was selected through a governance vote that ended on Dec. 18, featuring bids from three different security companies. It won the role through an open, public process that may provide a look into how DAOs will do business over time. 📰 The Defiant

Kimbal Musk Wants to Disrupt Philanthropy With the Big Green DAO. Tat the end of November, Elon Musk’s younger brother inaugurated the Big Green DAO, or “decentralized autonomous organization.” An offshoot of Big Green, the Colorado-based school-gardening nonprofit he founded in 2011, the DAO is a sort of digital foundation that plans to take money from donors and dispense it according to a strict set of rules encoded in blockchain technology. 📰 Bloomberg

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🖼️ NFT & Metaverse News

NFT Lending Platform ‘Arcade’ Raises $15M in Funding Round. The funding will help Arcade launch publicly next year, in a transition from its current private beta form. It will also be used to increase the reach of its services to more users, as well as to expand its 13-person team in areas across legal, product, business development, marketing, and engineering functions. Arcade (formerly Pawn.fi) lets users borrow against their NFTs as collateral. The company appraises, validates and curates NFT collections for institutions, DAOs and collectors. Through this service, lenders get access to a new income source, and asset owners can achieve liquidity on their holdings whilst retaining rights and access to collateral on the platform. 📰 NFT Plaza

Music NFT Innovator Sound.xyz Raises $5 Million in Seed Funding. NFT music start-up, Sound.xyz, has raised a staggering $5 million in its latest round of funding, which will be used to beef up the development of its platform. The bulk of funds arrived via investment firm, a16z, with further contributions by Variant Fund and Atelier Ventures, as well as a number of angel investors, including 21 Savage, Holly Herndon and DJ Drama. This new injection of funds will set in motion the next phase of its development and allow the team behind the operation to scale up its offering. 📰 NFT Plaza

Team Vaynerchuk Partners up with Toymaker Mattel. The world of the non-fungible has blurred the lines between virtual and reality once again. Toy creator for the ages, Mattel, partnered up with team Vaynerchuk to create a deck of fully playable VeeFriends UNO cards. This highly collectible version of the classic card game features 17 eye-catching designs drawing from the VeeFriends universe. Including classic characters such as Charming Cheetah, Resourceful Robin, and of course, the rarest card of them all, Gary Bee. 📰 NFT Plaza

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