Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Compiled by Wu Zhu, Jinse Finance
Driven by record-breaking minting activities and growing use cases, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) consolidated their position as the cornerstone of crypto innovation in 2024.
The new year is poised to push the boundaries of NFTs even further, as real-world applications drive mainstream adoption, cultural breakthroughs redefine the concept of ownership, and the momentum across various fronts sets the stage for even greater achievements in 2025!
From infrastructure improvements to price surges, here are five bold predictions that I believe will define the next chapter of the NFT revolution.
New Minting Records
According to Electric Capital's annual developer report, the NFT space experienced its most active year yet.
Empowered by the low transaction fees of Ethereum's Layer 2 solutions and the increasingly fierce competition from alternative Layer 1s, creators launched more NFT contracts than ever before, and met equally strong demand: minting volumes, trading volumes, and the number of active minting wallets all reached historic highs in 2024.
Looking ahead to 2025, the crypto space should brace for another wave of NFT innovation and activity. Renewed interest from creators and consumers, coupled with improvements in user experience and pioneering consumer-facing applications, should lay the foundation for unprecedented growth.
We'll be closely watching for new developments in the Abstract ecosystem, as well as the continued rise of on-chain proxies like Virtuals and Wayfinder, as frontiers of NFT adoption.
Infrastructure to Play a Bigger Role
While NFTs are most easily associated with the proliferation of on-chain collectibles, we expect the less obvious non-fungible use cases to see the most adoption in 2025.
Stablecoin issuer Liquity recently integrated NFTs for its V2, allowing users to transfer or trade their collateralized debt positions. Polymarket's conditional NFTs facilitate the creation of prediction markets, while the emerging AI agent creation platform Virtuals uses NFTs to track contributions within its Immutable Contribution Vault (ICV) system.
NFTs will continue to be a comfortable format for artists to distribute their creations, but expect this transformative technology to play a greater role in practical on-chain applications.
Cambrian Explosion of On-Chain Gaming
In October, Starknet collaborated with Cartridge's on-chain gaming masters to stress-test its L2, setting a new L2 speed record in the process! During the trial period, Starknet's average fees were just $0.002 per transaction, with a maximum throughput of 867 TPS.
The rise of account abstraction has greatly improved the user experience for crypto newcomers, and while mainstream laggards have yet to widely adopt crypto gaming, the space offers players true ownership of in-game items and introduces token incentive mechanisms, allowing it to both drive financial participation and uncover new data.
As blockchain infrastructure continues to improve in 2025, we expect the growing prevalence of on-chain gaming to push L2s to their first-ever +1k TPS milestone.
Bitcoin Puppets to Breakthrough
Imagine it's November 2025, and BTC has just breached $500,000. The US, under the leadership of Donald Trump, continues to accumulate BTC as a strategic reserve. This momentum shows no signs of slowing.
In this newfound era of prosperity, BTC whales may attempt to flaunt their wealth through top-tier NFT projects (much like Ether OGs did during the last bull run). As a consensus game that is at the forefront of the niche Ordinals space and enjoys strong community support, Bitcoin Puppets is uniquely positioned to capture a large share of this influx.
Under such favorable conditions, Bitcoin Puppets not only has the potential to ride the bull market wave, but also to cement its position as a top 5 NFT collection by the end of the year.
CryptoPunks May Set New Records
Some of the biggest NFT sales in crypto have been CryptoPunks, and the "Alien" variety of this PFP series has firmly held the top spot on the sales leaderboard! Alien Punk 5822 sold for a record-breaking 8k ETH ($24 million) near the 2022 NFT bubble peak, and two of these highly sought-after collectibles changed hands at staggering eight-figure prices in 2024.
We expect ETH to rebound in 2025 as institutions and individuals increasingly seek access to decentralized finance systems and on-chain computation. Buoyed by these profound tailwinds, record-breaking Alien CryptoPunk sales may emerge.
