Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Compilation: Wu Zhu, Golden Finance
Driven by record minting activity and a growing number of use cases, NFTs solidified their position as the cornerstone of crypto innovation in 2024.
The new year is expected to push the boundaries of NFTs to the limit, as real-world applications drive mainstream adoption, and cultural breakthroughs redefine the concept of ownership. With momentum building in various areas, the field will achieve greater success by 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 space experienced its most active year to date.
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 set new historical highs in 2024.
Looking ahead to 2025, the crypto space should be prepared for another wave of NFT innovations and activities. The rekindled 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 greater role
Although NFTs are most easily associated with the flood of on-chain collectibles, we expect that non-obvious non-fungible use cases will see the most adoption in 2025.
Stablecoin issuer Liquity recently integrated NFTs for V2, allowing users to transfer or trade their collateralized 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 remain a comfortable format for artists to distribute their creations, but we anticipate this transformative technology to play a larger role in practical on-chain applications.
The Cambrian explosion of gaming
In October, Starknet collaborated with the on-chain game master Cartridge to stress test its L2, setting a new speed record for L2 in the process! During the trial period, Starknet's average fee was only $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 yet to adopt crypto gaming on a large scale, the field offers players ownership of in-game items and introduces token incentives to promote financial participation while mining new data.
As blockchain infrastructure continues to improve in 2025, we expect the growing popularity of on-chain gaming to drive L2 to exceed +1k TPS for the first time ever.
Bitcoin Puppets will see a breakthrough
Imagine this: It’s now November 2025, BTC has just broken through $500,000, and the United States, under the leadership of Donald Trump, continues to accumulate BTC as a strategic reserve. There are no signs of this momentum slowing down.
In this newly discovered era of abundance, BTC whales may try to flaunt their wealth through top NFT projects (just as Ether OGs did during the last bull market). As a consensus game leading in the niche Ordinals space with strong community support, Bitcoin Puppets has a unique advantage to capture the largest share of these inflows.
Under such favorable conditions, Bitcoin Puppets could not only ride the wave of a bull market but also solidify its 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 of the sales leaderboard! Alien Punk 5822 was sold for a record 8k ETH ($24 million) around the peak of the NFT bubble in 2022, with two of these highly sought-after collectibles changing hands for jaw-dropping eight-figure prices in 2024.
We anticipate ETH will rebound in 2025, as both institutions and individuals seek greater access to decentralized finance systems and on-chain computing. With these profound tailwinds, record-breaking sales of Alien CryptoPunks may emerge.
