New Year Trends and Topics

A year ago, the NFT world was rosy. The demand was huge, the hype reached its boiling point: a trading volume of 17 billion US dollars is a record since January. But even faster than things were going up, the market crashed. For the first time this year, a transaction volume of less than 300 million US dollars is expected for December. For investors, therefore, the question arises whether NFTs will also be under the wheels in the new year.

NFT Expectation Mitigation

If success is measured by big returns, the sobering answer is yes. Most NFTs don’t seem to live up to expectations fueled during the short but all the more intense hysteria. With the possible exception of blue chips – Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki etc. – and fewer and fewer examples, for example in the field of art. But here, too, prices and demand have fallen.

The lesson to be learned from 2022 is to reduce profit expectations. The market is oversaturated and the chances of resale are extremely low. However, this does not mean that the NFT field will not continue to develop and open new applications.

Tokenized game worlds

Earn money by playing or spend it on in-game purchases: games and crypto form many intersections, and especially lucrative ones for developers and publishers. This area is summarized in GameFi – Games / DeFi. The growth prospects are great. Projects increasingly rely on tokenized game worlds.

However, this is often criticized. Especially when the gameplay experience falls apart and the mechanics are similar to the game.

metaverse: Coming soon?

As a virtual button, the Metaverse is GameFi in its purest form, a veritable Eldorado for NFTs – if virtual reality ever existed. The brave new 3D world is still in the design phase. It could take years to implement.

Previous blockchain-based proto-projects, Decentraland, The Sandbox, etc., are gimmicks, but not what most people imagine the Metaverse to be. Perhaps the largest NFT application area remains a shaky candidate for now.

Where is the music playing?

Artists have been among the winners of the NFT boom. For them, non-fungible tokens were and are appropriate means to bring works or property rights to buyers. Without the detours of the usual sales channels. But with higher shares.

However, musical NFTs have yet to catch on for a variety of reasons. Streaming seems to be the more practical choice for consumers, enthusiasts prefer haptic media like vinyl, and there’s virtually no incentive for investors. The most attractive business here seems to be the bonus business, which could gain in relevance in the years to come.

Growth accelerator social networks

No matter what: avatar collections such as those from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki and Co. continue to be perennial favorites among NFTs. scope, contributed to it.

NFTs are now integrated into most social networks in one form or another. You can discuss the quality, benefits and prices. As an investment, however, they have most likely asserted themselves. Social media is likely to remain one of the biggest growth accelerators in the NFT industry.

Static was yesterday

Due to the ability to map and transfer ownership rights, NFTs have offered themselves as a form of investment. In the meantime, however, the possibilities extend further. NFTs extend their functionality and adapt to new applications.

An increasingly common form are dynamic NFTs, also known as dNFTs. They allow editing of metadata, which can change the content displayed. This is interesting, for example, for NFT-based game characters or works of art. An example of this: Beeples Human One.

Token Trends for 2023

With the help of so-called split NFTs, it is also often possible to split the tokens and thus make them accessible to a wider mass. This means that high-priced NFTs can be traded proportionally. But split NFTs are also suitable for tokenization of real assets such as real estate or luxury goods.

The intertwining of the physical and the digital has an interface with so-called non-fungible phygital tokens. The artificial word phygital refers to NFTs that offer digital and real added value. Like NFT tickets that include meetings with artists. Or a pair of real sneakers with a virtual counterpart. Due to the increasing diffusion of extended reality methods, the market for phygital NFTs is likely to grow in the coming years.

New Year New luck?

The outlook for the NFT market: bright to cloudy. Cheerful because technology is advancing, there are more apps, more awareness about it, and thanks to social media, potentially more buyers.

Cloudy, because the promise of NFTs as an investment often goes unfulfilled. NFTs serve more as a means to an end and less as an end in themselves than as an object of speculation. The climate for investors should remain rather difficult over the coming year. However, this does not change much for the future development of the NFT sector.

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