NFT
According to data from NFT Valuations, the market cap of the NFT market is currently around $8.9-$11 billion, ⅔ of which comes from Profile Picture (PFP) collections like Crypto Punks and Bored Apes. Last year, NFTs proved that they can provide a wide array of valuable benefits. In markets plagued by counterfeiting and fraud – such as art, luxury brands or other collectibles – NFTs can provide authentication.
NFTs on Poylgon (MATIC) is booming with the participation of many famous brands, which use Polygon’s technology to issue NFTs. The well-known coffee brand – Starbucks – has launched the NFT loyalty program on Polygon. Other brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, Meta, etc. have also dipped their toes into the NFT world.
Most of the NFTs available on the market today are Static NFTs but in the future, dNFTs (Dynamic NFTs) may be the trend of the market, which bring a lot of advantages over Static NFTs and can be adopted in areas such as blockchain gaming, art or real world assets, etc.
GameFi
Despite many problems, GameFi still attracts the attention of investment funds. As Investgame reported, the number of projects calling for and receiving investment funds in Q1-Q3 2022 were still as much as when GameFi exploded in Q2-Q3 2021.
In Q3 2022, seed rounds represented 67% of all VC funds. The ranking of “Web3 Gaming Investors” includes many familiar names in the market such as Animoca Brands, Polygon Ventures, Jump Crypto, etc. Animoca Brands leads the ranking with 51 investment deals completed with a total amount of up to $1,229M.
A new paradigm for GameFi is Free-to-Own. Its core mechanism involves offering players of a game (or future game) the opportunity to mint – for free – digital assets of value within a game economy. This model promises to bring a stable economy for games that can sustain and create more intrinsic value for NFTs.
ENS & Identity
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once showed special interest in Decentralized Identity with Proof-of-Humanity to prevent hackers taking advantage of anonymity to do bad things. Ethereum Name Service (ENS) aims to map human-readable names, such as ‘alice.eth’, to machine-readable identifiers like Ethereum addresses.Users can move their crypto assets to other people via domain names (ENS Domain) without using the long string names of random characters.
The number of domain names increased sharply in Q2-Q3 2022. The identification in the crypto space has caused a lot of controversy as it lost the inherent decentralization and anonymity of the blockchain but this is still a potential trend that can connect traditional users to crypto more easily, and support the development of Social as well.
AI & Data Integrity
The combination of AI and blockchain will open a new technology era. The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI at the end of November has attracted much attention from the community. However, AI products haven’t really become accessible to users, it still needs a lot of time to develop and improve applicability. Some prominent AI projects are FET, AGIX, OCEAN, GRT, etc.