āØĀ This post originally appeared in Metaversal on BanklessĀ āØ
As we reflect on 2023, it's evident that the NFT space just weathered a tough bear market.
Yet resilience has been our hallmark, with numerous projects not only surviving but thriving here thanks to new advancements and new tailwinds.
Accordingly, today letās dive into the most prominent NFT trends of this past year, spotlighting the biggest happenings and notable projects that got us to where we are now!
-WMP
P.S. This is the final Metaversal post of 2023! Iāll be back with my next post on Jan. 5th after a little holiday R&R. In the meantime, Happy New Year!
The 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 š
1. Rise of the NFT L2s
When I first started tracking NFTs in 2019, the L2 scene didnāt exist yet.
Fast forward to this year, and weāve started to see all kinds of NFT-friendly L2 advances.
First-movers like Arbitrum and Optimism have started gaining more minting activity and have seen their evolving tech stacks embraced for launching new culture-centric rollups, e.g.Ā XaiĀ andĀ Redstone.
Big industry names like Coinbase and Zora also joined the fray, deployingĀ BaseĀ andĀ Zora NetworkĀ respectively.
And new upstarts have thrown their hats in the ring, likeĀ Frame, an L2 thatās enshrining things like NFT royalties directly into its network.
In other words, the NFT Scaling Era has officially begun!
2. New PFP Powers
The profile picture (PFP) sector of NFTs was particularly hard hit this bear market, with attention and floor prices caving in for most projects through the first three quarters of the year.
However, some collections bucked this downtrend and became new powerhouses in the PFP category, namely Opepens and Pudgy Penguins.
Launched in May 2023 with Set 001, Jack ButcherāsĀ Opepens have provided a new blueprintĀ for how to release a collectively curated NFT collection over time, capturing the imaginations of thousands in the process.
As for Pudgy Penguins, the project ascended into āblue-chip PFFā status after a string of big developments in 2023, not least among them theĀ placement of Pudgy Toys in 2,000 Walmart stores.
3. Games Get Gud
The entire NFT gaming scene made strides broadly in 2023, yet itās safe to say that the spaceās reigning S-tier titlesāAxie Infinity and Parallelācontinued to separate from the pack.
Not only did Axieās ecosystem swell with a handful of new Axie-based titles, the franchiseās main game also fielded huge upgrades like the arrival ofĀ Axie Experience PointsĀ (AXP) and theĀ Axie Parts EvolutionĀ system.
On the other hand, Parallel releasedĀ new starter decksĀ this year and kicked off itsĀ Closed Beta gameplay, which has seemingly received rave reviews from everyone whoās tried it, including myself.
These two games are better than theyāve ever been, and thereās much more to come!
4. The Infra Renaissance
There was anĀ explosionĀ of incredible and varied infrastructure developments around NFTs in 2023.
For example,Ā Nouns V3Ā just open-sourced the first DAO-native forking mechanism.
TheĀ ENS Name WrapperĀ also arrived, offering unprecedented flexibility and functionalities to ENS domain holders.
And we canāt forget Zora, which unveiledĀ Protocol Rewards, a system for rewarding Zora users with ETH.
Yet this is all just scratching the surface. ERC-6551 justĀ turned every NFT into a wallet, mint.fun madeĀ minting easy, Privy introduced user-friendlyĀ embedded wallets, so on and so forth.
Long story short, itās a good time to be building around NFTs.
5. Multipolar Momentum
While Ethereum has dominated the vast majority of all NFT action for years now, the Bitcoin and Solana NFT scenes joined the NFT party in a big way in 2023.
Of course, the Bitcoin NFT scene has been rejuvenated and surging in activity ever since theĀ arrival of Ordinals, a new native tokenization system for Bitcoin, back in January.
In kind, Ordinals quickly inspired the standardization of other alternative Bitcoin tokenization methods, likeĀ Stamps, which has only quickened the pace of recent Bitcoin NFT activity.
As for Solana, the network has become the next big airdrop frontier and has seen its SOL token and activity stats rally in recent months, bringing in a new influx of users that have swarmed to the chainās top projects, e.g. NFT marketplaces like Magic Eden and Tensor.
Accordingly, now Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana are the current majors when it comes to NFTs, and that dynamic seems poised to remain true for the foreseeable future.
6. Onchain Revival
2023 saw a resurgence inĀ onchain NFTsĀ and onchain experiments.
For instance, theĀ Chaos Roads mintĀ and the recentĀ Terraforms updateĀ have pushed the boundaries of whatās possible with blockchain art.
Additionally, projects likeĀ BasePaintĀ andĀ PartyĀ have paved new avenues for people to coordinate and create together onchain.
Of course, āonchainā isnāt inherently better than āoffchain.ā Itās just that blockchains are a new type of medium + infra combo, and never before have the creative horizons here been so wide open with potential!
7. Crypto Socialās Bloom
Crypto social apps have risen to the fore in 2023, with prime examples here beingĀ WarpcastĀ andĀ Lens.
With this app surge has come new spotlights on NFTs, as these types of projects can and do natively highlight and facilitate NFT mints.
As such, itās now becoming that much easier to find what your friends are minting and to share with them what youāre minting at any given time.
Simply put, then, the rising crypto social scene this year has made NFTs more social in general!
8. Arrival of AI
Notably, 2023 witnessed the first big research undertakings around the crossroads of AI and NFTs.
In the metaverse sector,Ā Upstreet, an NFT-integrated multiplayer world designed for interactions between humans and AI agents, released a 28-pageĀ ChatWorldĀ that explored a variety of potential applications for AI agents within Upstreet.
Moreover, gaming experiments likeĀ Parallel ColonyĀ introduced the idea of ā1.5 player games,ā where humans will passively guide autonomous AI agents to perform a variety of different tasks, blurring the lines between where human play ends and AI play begins.
These types of efforts, while early, suggest the AI x NFT crossroads can beĀ massiveĀ going forward.
9. RWA Tokenization
RWA stands for āreal world assetsā on the blockchain, and they can be anything from real estate to physical trading cards.
One of the main ways to bring these sorts of offchain assets onchain?Ā By representing them with NFTs!
Indeed, in 2023 we saw the first high-profile demonstration of what NFT-powered RWAs can look like viaĀ Courtyardās tokenized PokĆ©mon card drops.
This is just one example on the cultural side of things, but more experimentsāboth cultural and financialāare coming here, and the first blueprints are decisively laid now.
10. Going Cross-Chain
2023 was also the year where taking NFTs cross-chain from one network to another became more viable than ever.
This is largely thanks to the rise of projects like LayerZero, the pioneer of Omnichain NFTs for transferring between blockchains, andĀ Holograph, which has developed Hologram NFTs that can maintain consistent IDs on all Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments.
Additionally, ChainlinkāsĀ Cross-Chain Interoperability ProtocolĀ (CCIP) arrived this year, paving another robust avenue for projects to make NFTs interoperable across a range of chains.
As such, NFTs no longer need to be isolated to one network. They can go where they need to go, and this is a newer possibility that will undoubtedly be explored extensively in the years ahead!
Action steps:
-
šŖ Catch up on my previous write-up: 2024 NFT Airdrops
-
š Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror