Booming Trends in the Crypto Market
An article we liked from Thought Leader Alex Topchishvili of CoinList:
Five Crypto Trends To Watch in 2022
2021 has been a milestone year for the crypto market.
Crypto is not only a hot topic in the financial world, it is now a pillar of popular culture too. NFTs have taken off, BTC and ETH hit new all-time highs, ecosystems on Ethereum alternatives like Solana and Polkadot have grown exponentially, and we have more institutional buy-in from major enterprises than ever before. As we look ahead to next year, here’s what we, and our community, are seeing.
1. Most in-demand category for 2022: Gaming
In a recent “Crypto Predictions for 2022” survey with 4,444 respondents, we asked our community what category of projects they wanted to see most on CoinList in 2022. The number one response was gaming (56.5%), highlighting the trending belief that gaming will be the tipping point for mass adoption of blockchain. DeFi (52.1%) and NFTs (41.6%) were the second and third most in-demand categories, followed by L1s/L2s (31.4%), infrastructure (28.3%), social tokens (22.8%), and governance (16.2%).
Play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity are taking crypto mainstream and exposing more people to DeFi and NFTs. As the survey results indicate, the intersection between DeFi and gaming will only grow in 2022, and gaming-focused platforms like Flow and Immutable X stand to gain major traction. Blockchain gaming will allow a new generation of gamers to own in-game assets and trade them on secondary markets, and we look forward to supporting the advancement and adoption of these vibrant ecosystems in 2022.
Gaming and metaverse (a digital universe built in game-like environments) were also voted as the top two use cases for NFTs in 2022, far surpassing profile pictures (the most common use case in 2021), event tickets, membership, and crowdfunding.
Will we see NFTs built into non-blockchain games and platforms like Oculus and Instagram? Will we see a rise in decentralized, user-owned gaming platforms? Time will tell, but given the massive amount of investment going into gaming and metaverse, including pivots into the space from tech giants such as Meta Platforms, we would not bet against it.
2. Ethereum is not the only party worth attending
The Ethereum ecosystem is exceptional. No other platform has directly driven as much innovation in crypto and the metaverse as Ethereum, by a long shot. But while the massive surge in demand we’ve seen this year was a huge net positive for the industry in 2021, this summer’s NFT mania pushed the Ethereum network to its breaking point, and rendered it unusable for many retail users due to high gas fees and scalability problems, prompting them to look for alternative options.
No L1 project grew faster and posed more of a threat to Ethereum this year than...
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Thanks for this article excerpt and its graphics to Alex Topchishvili of CoinList.
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