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2023 NFT HighlightsThe 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 📆

2023 NFT HighlightsThe 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 📆

CointimeCointime2024/01/04 14:30
By:Cointime

✨ This post originally appeared in Metaversal on Bankless ✨

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 let’s 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! I’ll be back with my next post on Jan. 5th after a little holiday RR. In the meantime, Happy New Year!

The 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 📆

2023 NFT HighlightsThe 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 📆 image 0

1. Rise of the NFT L2s

When I first started tracking NFTs in 2019, the L2 scene didn’t exist yet.

Fast forward to this year, and we’ve 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.  Xai  and  Redstone .

Big industry names like Coinbase and Zora also joined the fray, deploying  Base  and  Zora Network  respectively.

And new upstarts have thrown their hats in the ring, like  Frame , an L2 that’s 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 Butcher’s  Opepens have provided a new blueprint  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 “blue-chip PFF” status after a string of big developments in 2023, not least among them the  placement of Pudgy Toys in 2,000 Walmart stores .

3. Games Get Gud

2023 NFT HighlightsThe 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 📆 image 1

The entire NFT gaming scene made strides broadly in 2023, yet it’s safe to say that the space’s reigning S-tier titles—Axie Infinity and Parallel—continued to separate from the pack.

Not only did Axie’s ecosystem swell with a handful of new Axie-based titles, the franchise’s main game also fielded huge upgrades like the arrival of  Axie Experience Points  (AXP) and the  Axie Parts Evolution  system.

On the other hand, Parallel released  new starter decks  this year and kicked off its  Closed Beta gameplay , which has seemingly received rave reviews from everyone who’s tried it, including myself.

These two games are better than they’ve ever been, and there’s much more to come!

4. The Infra Renaissance

There was an explosion of incredible and varied infrastructure developments around NFTs in 2023.

For example,  Nouns V3  just open-sourced the first DAO-native forking mechanism.

The  ENS Name Wrapper  also arrived, offering unprecedented flexibility and functionalities to ENS domain holders.

And we can’t forget Zora, which unveiled  Protocol Rewards , a system for rewarding Zora users with ETH.

Yet this is all just scratching the surface. ERC-6551 just  turned every NFT into a wallet , mint.fun made  minting easy , Privy introduced user-friendly  embedded wallets , so on and so forth.

Long story short, it’s a good time to be building around NFTs.

5. Multipolar Momentum

2023 NFT HighlightsThe 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 📆 image 2

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 the  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, like  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 chain’s 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 in  onchain NFTs  and onchain experiments.

For instance, the  Chaos Roads mint  and the recent  Terraforms update  have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible with blockchain art.

Additionally, projects like  BasePaint  and  Party  have paved new avenues for people to coordinate and create together onchain.

Of course, “onchain” isn’t inherently better than “offchain.” It’s 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 Social’s Bloom

Crypto social apps have risen to the fore in 2023, with prime examples here being  Warpcast  and  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, it’s now becoming that much easier to find what your friends are minting and to share with them what you’re 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

2023 NFT HighlightsThe 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 📆 image 3

Notably, 2023 witnessed the first big research undertakings around the crossroads of AI and NFTs.

In the metaverse sector,  Upstreet , an NFT-integrated multiplayer world designed for interactions between humans and AI agents, released a 28-page  ChatWorld  that explored a variety of potential applications for AI agents within Upstreet.

Moreover, gaming experiments like  Parallel Colony  introduced the idea of “1.5 player games,” 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 be massive going forward.

9. RWA Tokenization

RWA stands for “real world assets” 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? By representing them with NFTs!

Indeed, in 2023 we saw the first high-profile demonstration of what NFT-powered RWAs can look like via  Courtyard’s tokenized Pokémon card drops .

This is just one example on the cultural side of things, but more experiments—both cultural and financial—are 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, and  Holograph , which has developed Hologram NFTs that can maintain consistent IDs on all Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments.

Additionally, Chainlink’s  Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol  (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!

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Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.

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