Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Translated by: Wu Zhu, Jinse Finance
Driven by record minting activities and growing use cases, NFTs solidified their position as a cornerstone of crypto innovation in 2024.
The new year is expected to push the boundaries of NFTs to the extreme, as real-world applications drive mainstream adoption, cultural breakthroughs redefine the concept of ownership, and with momentum building across the board, the sector will achieve greater accomplishments in 2025!
From infrastructure improvements to soaring prices, 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 sector experienced its most active year yet.
Thanks to low transaction fees from Ethereum's Layer 2 solutions and increasing competition from alternative Layer 1s, creators launched more NFT contracts than ever before, with equally strong demand: minting volume, trading volume, and the number of active minting wallets all reached historic highs in 2024.
Looking ahead to 2025, the crypto space should prepare for another wave of NFT innovation and activity. Renewed interest from creators and consumers, combined with improved user experiences and groundbreaking consumer-facing applications, should lay the groundwork for unprecedented growth.
We will closely monitor new developments in the Abstract ecosystem and the continued rise of on-chain agents like Virtuals and Wayfinder as the forefront of NFT adoption.
Infrastructure will play a larger role
Although NFTs are most easily associated with an oversaturation of image-based collectibles, we expect non-obvious non-fungible use cases to see the most adoption in 2025.
Stablecoin issuer Liquity recently integrated NFTs into V2, enabling users to transfer or trade their collateral debt positions. Polymarket's conditional NFTs facilitated the creation of a betting market, while the emerging AI agent creation platform Virtuals uses NFTs in its Immutable Contribution Vault (ICV) system to track contributions.
NFTs will continue to be a comfortable format for artists to distribute their creations, but we expect this transformative technology to play a larger role in practical on-chain applications.
Cambrian explosion of games
In October, Starknet partnered with Cartridge's on-chain gaming masters to stress test its L2 and set new L2 speed records in the process! During the trial period, Starknet's average fee was just $0.002 per transaction, processing up to 867 transactions per second.
The rise of account abstraction features has greatly improved the user experience for crypto newcomers. Although mainstream laggards have not yet widely adopted crypto gaming, this sector provides players with ownership of in-game items and introduces token incentives, allowing for the exploration of new data while promoting financial participation.
With blockchain infrastructure continuously improving by 2025, we anticipate that the increasing popularity of on-chain gaming will drive L2 to achieve +1k TPS for the first time ever.
Bitcoin Puppets will breakthrough
Imagine this: It’s now November 2025, BTC has just surpassed $500,000, and the United States, under Donald Trump, continues to accumulate BTC as a strategic reserve. There are no signs of this momentum slowing.
In this newly discovered era of abundance, BTC whales may attempt to flaunt their wealth through top NFT projects (just as Ether OGs did during the last bull market). Bitcoin Puppets, leading in the niche Ordinals space with strong community support, hold a unique advantage to capture the largest share of these inflows.
Under such favorable conditions, Bitcoin Puppets may not only ride the wave of the bull market but also solidify their position as one of the top 5 NFT collectibles by the end of the year.
CryptoPunks may set new records
Some of the largest NFT sales in cryptocurrency are CryptoPunks, and the 'Alien' variant of this PFP series firmly holds the top spot on the sales leaderboard! Alien Punk 5822 sold for a record 8k ETH ($24 million) around the peak of the 2022 NFT bubble, with two of these highly sought-after collectibles changing hands for staggering 8-figure prices in 2024.
We expect ETH to recover in 2025 as both institutions and individuals seek more access to decentralized financial systems and on-chain computing. With these profound tailwinds, record-breaking sales of Alien CryptoPunks may occur.
