As we look back at 2023, the NFT market has gone through different stages of ups and downs from anxiety, fear when a series of Blue Chip NFTs dropped sharply in price in just a short period of time to optimism when witnessing The NFT market’s miraculous recovery occurred in the last 3 months of the year. So what are the main trends of the NFT market in 2023? Let’s review with Weakhand in this article.
Before jumping into the article, everyone can refer to some of the following articles to understand better.
- What is PFP NFT? Why is PFP NFT so popular?
- NFT market recovers, which Blockchain is being left behind?
- What is Bitcoin Ordinals? Everything about Bitcoin Ordinals
NFT Market 2023: Ups and Downs Mixed
As an NFT investor in 2023, we have probably experienced many emotions from the market. Around the beginning of the year, with Blur launching tokens and Airdrops for NFT traders on Ethereum, a series of NFT collections on the market witnessed a series of strong price increases.
Around the middle of the year from May – August 2023, the market entered a period of price decline, especially the leading Bluechip NFT collections such as: Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Azuki or Degods all witnessed a decrease in prices. plummeted in just a short period of time. Newly launched NFT collections have floor prices that are even below mint prices. There is a theme in the media that NFTs are dead, NFTs have no value. All of this has caused panic among investors, causing massive sell-off in the market.
This is probably also the first time that the NFT market has experienced a winter and it really makes many investors discouraged, even leaving the market. After a fierce summer, the last 3 months of the year were the time of miraculous recovery for the market and leading this upward trend was the return of NFT Gaming. The full range of investor emotions has been expressed in an up and down 2023 across the entire NFT market.
Key Trends of the NFT Market in 2023
The rise of Layer 2 NFTs
During the boom period of the NFT market in 2021/2022, the main trend appeared mainly on Ethereum and then spread to some large Layer 1s in the market such as Solana or Polygon. But with the continuous change of the market, Layer 1 no longer seems to receive much attention and instead there is an explosion of Layer 2 such as: Optimism, Arbitrum, ZkSync,… on Ethereum.
We have seen the emergence of specialized Layer 2 for NFTs such as Zora or Frame. While other Layer 2s also pay special attention to NFTs such as: Base with the Onchain Summer program or most recently Art Week Onchain. Pioneers such as Arbitrum or Optimism also have many activities promoting the NFT minting process on their ecosystem. Another highlight is the appearance of Xai – Layer 3 on Arbitrum and Redstone – Layer 2 built on Op Stack, both focusing on Gaming/ NFT segment. With this extraordinary interest, we now see the era of NFT scaling officially beginning.
New trend of PFP NFT
The PFP NFT segment is considered the main trend of the NFT market during the 2021/2022 boom period but is also hardest hit by the bear market in 2023 with most projects seeing a decline strong in just a short period of time.
However, we also witness a number of projects going against the trend and becoming dark horses leading the market, specifically the rise of two projects Openens and Pudgy Penguins.
For Openens is the creation of Jack Butcher’s with a plan to release a new NFT collection in which participants are only limited to mint time while a few other things like mint quantity,… will not be. limited. In addition, each NFT is also minted at a low price of only about 8 USD, driving user interest and participation.
For Pudgy Penguins, it is a completely new direction and different from most previous PFP NFTs when entering the web2 toy market. This is the development direction that Luca Netz outlined from the beginning when he became the new takeover of Pudgy Penguins. Up to now, Pudgy Penguins is considered the most successful NFT collection on the market in terms of both price and influence in the NFT market.
The return of NFT Gaming
Gaming has long been considered an extremely important spearhead for the Crypto market. With the demise of Axie Infinity and Play to Earn titles, in both 2022 and the first half of 2023, we no longer seem to see GameFi mentioned much in the market.
However, with the appearance of a series of blockbuster games in the last 3 months of the year such as: Parrallel, Big Time, Shrapnel or Skyborne Legacy, NFT Gaming has returned and is also the main reason promoting the recovery of the market. school in recent times.
Infrastructure improvements
2023 saw an incredible explosion of infrastructure around NFTs. We can mention that ENS name wrappers were released, providing ENS domain owners with unprecedented flexibility and functionality, Zora launched Protocol Rewards – an ETH reward system for Zora users or the emergence of the ERC 6551 standard turns every NFT into a wallet, opening up a new era and many applications for NFTs.
The participation of many new Blockchains
Ethereum is still the leading Blockchain for NFTs but this pie is probably shared with many other Blockchains. We can mention Bitcoin NFT and Bitcoin Ordinals, although only launched in just a year, they have created a boom in the market.
For Solana, after the BreakPoint event and the airdrop fever in November, a series of NFTs also witnessed strong growth, typically the Mad Labs or Tensorians collections. On Injective, we have Injective Quants or most recently on Sei with the Seiyans collection. In terms of the community and ongoing NFT projects, in general Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana are still the main trends of NFTs at the present time and this trend will continue in the near future.
The Rise of NFTs Onchain
With the explosion of Bitcoin Ordinals and Elon Musk’s conversation on Joe Rogan’s Podcast, the NFT community started talking excitedly about NFTs that it would be better for NFTs to be stored onchain. At the present time, most NFTs on the market are Offchain, meaning that NFT data will not be stored directly on the Blockchain but will be mostly stored on a decentralized storage service such as : Filecoin, IPFS or Arweare. Elon Musk’s comments in the Podcast unintentionally served as indirect support and helped Bitcoin Ordinals continue to explode.
The explosion of Decentralized Social Network projects
In 2023, we will see the emergence of a new trend in the market: Decentralized Social Network, also known as Desoc. The most typical is the rise of Farcaster, Lens Protocol or CyberConnect. NFTs play an extremely important part in this explosive trend when users need to own at least 1 NFT to participate in their ecosystem.
The combination of NFT and AI
2023 is considered a boom year for AI with the appearance of ChatGPT, which has attracted hundreds of millions of users in just a short period of time, AI projects in the Crypto market such as Fet,… also witnessed the strong growth.
In the NFT segment, we also see the first projects that bring the combination of NFT and AI. We can mention some prominent projects such as NFPrompt, which allows users to create NFTs using AI and can then list them on NFPrompt’s Marketplace, or Upstreet – a Metaverse project that has integrated NFTs designed for interaction. between humans and AI agents. Although most of these projects are still in their early stages, we can see that the combination of AI and NFTs could bring about significant change in the future.
RWA is already on the NFT market
RWA are real-world assets tokenized on the Blockchain and they can be anything from real estate to physical Trading Cards. We see one of the main ways to bring real-world assets onto the blockchain is to use NFTs to represent them.
In fact, 2023 also witnessed a short-term explosion of this trend when Courtyard released physical Pokemon cards encoded as NFTs and users who bought NFTs could convert them into any physical cards. when. In addition, Arcade also supports making loans using RWA assets encoded as NFTs with record loan values up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of USD.
The appearance of NFT Cross chain
Years ago transferring NFTs from one Blockchain to another was probably a luxury but it has been done and become a trend in 2023. This was achieved largely due to the increase of projects in LayerZero ecosystem, a pioneering Omnichain NFT project such as Lil Pudgy allows people to convert NFTs between major Blockchains in the market. This trend certainly does not stop but will become even more explosive in the future.
summary
The NFT market is always changing to adapt to new trends. Above are the main trends of the NFT market in 2023 that I want to mention in this article. I hope everyone has received useful knowledge.