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OKLink Insight of the Year | Lego Components of the Metasomes: NFT+GameFi, 2022 A preview of six Trends

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The crypto industry experienced many landmark events in 2021, with Bitcoin topping $60,000 for the first time, public companies embracing crypto assets, and bitcoin futures ETFs being passed through......

原文作者：0x6617

Original source: Oko Cloud chain

Looking back on 2021, NFT and GameFi successfully succeeded DeFi, making leapfrog development in terms of sales, market value, users and new projects.

As the annual "key words", NFT has emerged various hot topics such as Avatar, generative art and character NFT, which continue to attract the attention of the market. In addition to the horizontal development with art, collectibles, games, music and other things, NFT has also explored the vertical level, that is, its own programmability and interoperability, such as fragmentation, lending and so on.

The model of P2E has revolutionized the GameFi industry, and features such as financial attributes, playability and Meme have been fully integrated and played on GameFi. In a way, GameFi is a visual window into the metasomes, and its popularity helped NFT gain a foothold in the NFT market in the second half of 2021. But after the bonus period, GameFi also inevitably ushered in the labor period, the industry impact and shuffle of qualitative change time is coming.

The crypto industry experienced many landmark events in 2021, with Bitcoin topping $60,000 for the first time, public companies embracing crypto assets, bitcoin futures ETFs being approved... At the end of this post, we offer six predictions for 2022.

TL; DR

1, NFT

The upper-level use cases are obviously broken, the scene is more diversified, traditional companies and celebrities are pouring in at an accelerated pace, and the global popularity is high. The rapid growth of infrastructure such as public chains, Layer 2, publishing and trading platforms underpins NFT. Although Ethereum occupies the leading position, there are signs of NFT migrating to other public chains, and there may be a trend of fragmentation such as application chains. In terms of trading platforms, OpenSea is still the dominant one; Like DeFi, NFT began to explore areas such as lending, liquidity and asset management, promoting NFT financialization and liquidity injection is timely;

2, GameFi

The P2E model has contributed to the rise of GameFi. Although the established chain games are still deployed on Ethereum, some of them have already decided to migrate, while the new chain games tend to choose the Ethereum compatible chain with strong scalability, high TPS and low commission fees. GameFi's total transaction volume exceeded $44.7 billion, and the number of unique active wallets surpassed DeFi in the summer to become a major contributor to DApps. GameFi's total financing scale and single financing amount increased significantly, and the development of DAO also provided a new channel for GameFi to raise funds. On-chain ecosystems such as game guilds, IGO, developer tools, etc. are growing; GameFi is a technology-driven evolution of the traditional gaming model that gives players more power. P2E is a big selling point, but it faces many challenges, including lack of regulation, technology and industry standards. At the end of 2021, with the disappearance of the P2E dividend period, chain games in the economic model, playability and other problems, the industry is in urgent need of transformation;

3. Six predictions

Bitcoin is at a tipping point where the market cap gap between Ethereum and Bitcoin will narrow; The multi-chain pattern is more mature, application chains emerge, cross-chain bridge demand increases, Layer 2 ushered in the vigorous development; Institutions embrace DeFi, and regulators pay more attention to DeFi compliance development; NFT and chain travel are integrated into the meta-universe to accelerate expansion; With the opening of DAO era, standardized modules, frameworks and other services will be more perfect, allowing users to create DAO with one click. From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, the infrastructure is beginning to take shape, and Web 3.0 May become the key to break the Internet deadlock and continue to develop.

2021, the first year of NFT?

The year 2021 is the breakout year of NFT. Many people have even called 2021 "the first year of NFT," and Collins Dictionary has named "NFT" as the word of the year for 2021 with an 11,000 percent increase in usage over the past year. Beat out a slew of candidates like "double-vaxxed," "Cheugy," "Metaverse," and "Crypto."

In 2021, nearly $17.2 billion was traded on NFT compared to 2020, a 131-fold sequential increase. The news of NFT works being sold at high prices in 2021 is also a constant one, among which artist Pak's "The Merge" set a new NFT sales record with a price of $91.8 million. The traditional industry giants, Disney, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Burberry and so on have set foot in NFT, Musk, Curry, O 'neill, Yue Wenle, Lin Junjie and other celebrities have also been captured by NFT...

Admittedly, in 2021, NFT was the subject of a huge and controversial discussion, with NFT enthusiasts calling it the key to unlock the meta-universe and outsiders calling it nothing more than a JPEG scam, but in any case, it's been hard to escape the "NFT" conversation in the crypto world over the past few months.

1. What is NFT?

Collins dictionary defines NFT (non-Fungible Token) as "a unique digital certificate registered on a blockchain for recording ownership of assets such as art or collectibles."

From a technical point of view, the existing NFT is mainly based on ERC721 standard. Compared with ERC20, it adds "unique ID" and "metadata". Of course, there is also the existing ERC1155 standard, which is considered by some to be an improvement over ERC721. ERC1155 aims to create two types of smart contract interfaces, homogeneous and non-homogeneous tokens.

In terms of genre, works of art, collectibles, avatars, game props, movie clips, and music can all be combined with NFT. As NFT evolves, we've seen extensions of it this year, such as fragmentable NFT, creating music NFT based on streaming payments, NFT lending, and more.

2, the explosive NFT market

In June 2020, THE DeFi field broke out, and NFT was once considered as its successor, but at that time, as NFT had not broken the circle, the topic was still at the vision level, so after a wave of hot discussion, the NFT market gradually cooled down.

The milestone occurred in March 2021 with digital artist Beeple's NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days was auctioned at Christie's for more than $69 million, instantly attracting attention from inside and outside The circle and igniting The upsurge of NFT. Sotheby's and Fuyi, which are also known as The three major auction houses with Christie's, also joined The ranks of NFT works of cryptographic art successively.

In 2021, NFT's total annual transaction volume was $17.175 billion, a 131-fold sequential increase from $130 million in 2020.

February-may is a build-up period. Compared with the beginning of the year, NFT trading volume showed a small increase, but daily trading volume did not show an increase of magnitude. Since August, supported by GameFi, meta-universe and other concepts, NFT led by avatar class has captured the focus of the market. The monthly total transaction volume of NFT has reached a staggering $4.130 billion, which is $2.481 billion higher than the total from January to July. From September to December, monthly trading volume showed a downward trend, but compared with the beginning of the year, the NFT market trading volume has made a significant breakthrough.

Photo source:OKLink

The market capitalization of the top 100 NFT projects that issued homogeneous tokens increased by 953% from $4.980 billion on March 4, when NFT was not in full swing, to $52.423 billion on December 28.

Looking at the history of the NFT in 2021, we can see some qualitative changes in the NFT track:

NFT takes the three traditional use cases of games, art, and collectibles to a deeper level. Games begin to occupy a place, and art, collectibles, etc., become more diversified.

In the first half of 2021, NFT transactions were concentrated in art and collectibles (blue pillars), with Nifty Gateway, the NFT's leading platform for art transactions, trading $144 million in March. Compared with February's turnover of $75.265,600, it was up 91% month-on-month. In the second half of this year, with the rise of GameFi and metasomes, NFT in the Gaming category began to take over, and weekly Gaming transactions accounted for 40-50 percent of total transactions.

Image credit: The Block

After checking the composition of transaction volume in the segmented field, we find that Axie Infinity always dominates the NFT transaction in the game field. From the end of February to the beginning of April, NBA Top Shot (yellow column) occupied the main trading volume in the market. This was because NBA regular season and The Knockout round of the Champions League were in full swing at that time, which made basketball and football NFT attract much attention.

3 月 30 日，NBA Top Shot 的开发团队 Dapper Labs 宣布完成 3.05 亿美元的融资，投后估值升至 26 亿美元，此轮融资的参投方不乏 Michael Jordan、Kevin Durant 等知名 NBA 球星，而这也为体育类 NFT 及相关 Token 添了一把火。

In August, as an old gun in the head field, CryptoPunks (red column) sales exceeded 50 million DOLLARS a week, with an average price of 200,000 dollars, capturing the market focus. NFT of head rapidly swept the market. Since then, generative Art platform Art Blocks and text NFT Loot have taken over the popularity, thus forming a colorful situation in the Art and collectibles market.

Image credit: The Block

The upper-level use cases have obviously broken the circle, expanding to music, social, content creation and DeFi, and the scene is more diversified. Traditional companies and celebrities have begun to flood in and become popular around the world.

According to Google Trends, global searches for the word "NFT" surpassed Crypto for the first time during Christmas week, suggesting that the concept of Crypto collectibles may have entered the mainstream.

According to Chainalysis' 2021 NFT Market Report, NFT has gained global popularity with high web traffic across multiple regions, with Central and South Asia, North America, Western Europe and Latin America leading the way. Since March 2021, no region has accounted for more than 40% of NFT's monthly visitors.

Image credit: Chainalysis

Compared with 2020, the transaction price of NFT single products in 2021 is sky-high repeatedly, which is also the cause of NFT circle. Here's OKLink's Top 10 NFT pieces for 2021. The most expensive work was Artist Pak's Merge, which sold for $91.8 million.

In addition to crypto art, head collectibles still play an important role in NFT, with CryptoPunks from Larva Labs taking up five of the top ten. In tenth place was CROSSROAD by Beeple, which also sold for $6.6 million.

OKLink drawing

Infrastructure, such as the public chain, Layer 2, and publishing and trading platforms, also provide strong support for NFT.

As can be seen from the public chain NFT sales statistics, Ethereum sales accounted for 68% of the top 11 public chains, is worthy of the first tier, the total sales reached 12.746 billion DOLLARS, more than three times of the second Ronin. That's $6.643 billion more than the number 2 through 11 combined, mainly due to the fact that NFT in the collection and art categories is still active on Ethereum.

Ronin is the second most active player in terms of users and transactions due to the nature of the game, with $3.828 billion in sales. Flow and Solana are in the third tier, with combined sales of $863 million and $837 million, respectively. There is a clear disconnect between the different tiers.

Credit: Cryptoslam

From the perspective of public chain infrastructure, we find that, although Ethereum still occupies the leading position, NFT has already migrated to other public chains. After all, popular NFT is likely to cause Gas War, and Ethereum's high fees and congestion will raise the threshold of participation. Second, with the development of GameFi, NFT related to GameFi may be differentiated by high frequency on-chain interactions, such as Ronin and Immutable.

In addition to the public chain, the NFT trading platform is also a critical infrastructure for the NFT industry, since most users purchase NFT through a dedicated NFT marketplace.

Starting in the second quarter of 2021, Opensea (Blue Pillar) took the lead as the most popular NFT market, according to Dune Analytics NFT transaction volume statistics. In the second half of the year, Opensea accounted for more than 90% of the volume in the NFT market and remained the dominant player in the industry.

Image: Dune Analytics

OpenSea's August volume hit a record $3.426 billion, while OpenSea's total volume from June 2018 to July 2021 was just $1 billion, meaning August volume was 3.4 times the previous record. While OpenSea's monthly transaction volume declined from September to November, it was consistently above $2.3 billion. NFT trading volume started to recover in December, and total trading volume was the second highest after August.

Image: Dune Analytics

As of December 31, OpenSea ethereum had more than 900,000 total transactions and 360,000 monthly active users, while Polygon had more than 820,000 monthly active users and 177,000 monthly active users. Alexa data shows that OpenSea website traffic has entered the top 250 in the world, and is currently listed at 214.

Image credit: Alexa

As of January 4, 2022, OpenSea destroyed 145,300 ETH, valued at nearly $555 million, according to data from the OKLink Hot Contract feature page.

Photo source:OKLink

在 2021 年 7 月，OpenSea 完成了由 a16z 领投的 1 亿美元 B 轮融资，投后估值 15 亿美元，随着 NFT 市场的走热，OpenSea 作为第一大平台的地位也是水涨船高，此前一度有消息指出 OpenSea 或许会采用 IPO 的方式来替代发行治理 Token 以募集资金。

虽然 OpenSea 的 CFO 立刻对这一消息进行了否认，但作为 Web 3.0 的重要基石之一，OpenSea 略显朦胧的姿态仍让不少加密社区认为其似有「抛弃社区」、「走中心化道路」的嫌疑，而这也促成了不久前去中心化自治组织 OpenDAO 向 OpenSea 交易用户进行 SOS Token 空投一事，此举被不少加密人士誉为类似于 SushiSwap 抢夺 Uniswap 流量，是一场去中心化世界的用户向该平台疑似 IPO 行为的反抗。

除此之外，圈内用户较为关注的交易平台还包括 Rarible、SuperRare、LarvaLabs 以及 Foundation。LarvaLabs 以交易 CryptoPunks 为主，用户画像较为高端。Rarible 和 SuperRare 在 2021 发行了治理 Token ，其中 Rarible 与 OpenSea 的定位类似，走「亲民」路线，是一个以趣味艺术品为主，允许任何用户创作并展示自己作品的综合性平台。

SuperRare, on the other hand, covers more finely curated limited edition art NFT, where the platform has strict vetting criteria for artists who want to enter. Foundation, which is more restrictive than SuperRare, is an "invitation-only" NFT art platform where only invitation-only artists can be listed.

3. Phenomenal NFT products

In 2021, there are several NFT phenomena emerging in the market.

Photo source:OKLink

· Avatar BTC -- CryptoPunks

CryptoPunks topped the OKLink NFT project list with a total transaction value of $2.508 billion. As a project launched by Larva Labs in June 2017, CryptoPunks is one of the first NFT projects on ethereum blockchain.

After more than four years of development, CryproPunks established its legendary status in the NFT circle in August and September this year, and began to emerge in the mainstream art circle. It was listed in Christie's, Sotheby's and other internationally renowned auction houses, and successfully exhibited in the Miami Museum.

CryptoPunks saw a surge in sales in August, with total sales for the month reaching $680 million, up 402% from the previous month. On August 30, Larva Labs' website showed that the historical sales of CryptoPunks reached $1.16 billion, and the floor price was as high as 129 ETH, successive new record highs.

Photo source:OKLink

As a flagship project of NFT, CryptoPunks has many fans. Payment giant Visa purchased CryptoPunk #7610 on August 18 for 49.5 ETH (about $150,000). This behavior triggered users' Fomo emotion and crazy shopping behavior. After Visa announced the purchase of CryptoPunks, about 90 NFT in the series were sold within an hour, an 11-fold increase over the past 24 hours.

In addition, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, investor Feng Bo, Meitu Chairman CAI Wensheng, and Hong Kong star Yue Wenle are also CryptoPunks investors. CryptoPunks has become a crypto luxury. Owning it is not only a status symbol, but also considered a great tool to increase visibility. For example, Web 3.0 project Mask Network announced that it will buy CryptoPunks for 159 ETH.

· Avatar ETH -- Bored Ape Yacht Club

After the craze of CryptoPunks led to Avatar, a large number of similar projects such as Picasso Punks, 3DPunks and COVID-19 Punks began to appear on the market, but most of them were short-lived and soon lost their popularity. Only Bored Ape Yacht Club stood out, while BAYC's momentum was strong enough to see the Flip CryptoPunks in late December.

Like CyptoPunks, owning BAYC is also a status symbol, but unlike CryptoPunks, which relies on fans to set up their own chat rooms, discuss the project spontaneously, or develop various ways to indicate their membership, BAYC built a virtual community with collective identity for users from the very beginning. For example, as long as users have BAYC, they can freely access BAYC Bathroom (a virtual creative space where users can draw or write on the Bathroom wall to express their thoughts and emotions).

The Sandbox also has a piece of sky belonging to BAYC, which is only available to BAYC holders. Investment in BAYC is more like stepping on the two hot sectors of social and financial at the same time, allowing investors to take the lead in forming a bond of club members in the extensive and chaotic Internet relationship, enhancing the sense of identity and belonging of the holders.

In addition, BAYC attaches great importance to and constantly develops holder privileges, which is also one of the elements of BAYC's success. BAYC planned for an initial 10,000 NFT sales route, fulfilling the commitment as each milestone was reached, and this was followed by other projects.

例如 BAYC 为持有者创立了 Bored Ape Kennel Club，每一个 BAYC 的持有者可以免费领养一只 NFT 宠物狗 (当前地板价约为 5.79 ETH）。有消息指出 BYAC 计划将于 2022 年第一季度发行 Token ，虽然具体方案未释出，但推测应该会对其初始 NFT 持有者进行一定的激励。

BAYC's total transaction volume reached $974 million as of December 31. On December 29, BAYC surpassed CryptoPunks with a market cap of 843,613 ETH ($3.22 billion) and an average NFT price of 84 ETH, At this time, the market value of CryptoPunks is 670,236 ETH (about $2.55 billion), with an average price of about 67 ETH.

Photo source:OKLink

As of January 5th, according to OpenSea, the floor price of BAYC is 69.5 ETH, which is 868 times higher than its initial selling price of 0.08 ETH. The profit is amazing. BAYC also attaches great importance to brand marketing, adidas, Universal Music Group, Stephen Curry and others have joined BAYC.

In addition, BAYC has formed a partnership with Animoca Brands to create blockchain-based games that offer more varied gameplay and broader storytelling than CryptoPunks, which is still known as an avature-like NFT.

· NFT cutting-edge generative Art -- Art Blocks

As a platform for programmatically generating and storing works on ethereum on demand, Art Blocks allows users to choose a style they like, pay for the creation of works, and then algorithmically create a randomly generated version of content and send it to their Ethereum account. The results can range from still images to 3D models to interactive experiences. Each output is different, and there are endless possibilities for the types of content that can be created on the platform.

Unlike avatar NFT, the most intuitive feeling when buying Art Blocks is that the user is directly supporting an artist.

Art Blocks has long been known as a blue chip of generative Art. Anonymous NFT collectors Vincent Van Dough, Punk 6529, Su Zhu, founder of Three Arrows Capital, and others have spent millions of dollars on Art Blocks, The entry of The whale further solidifies its status and brand.

As of December 31, Art Blocks ranked second in NFT with $1.352bn in total transaction value.

· Loot: Lego components, which may bring paradigm shift of NFT, but lack of landing products

In mid-to-late August and early September, the cryptographic scene was hot at Loot, where images of eight-line characters written in black and white started popping up on social media. Loot as a text NFT came out of the blue, opened the encryption circle of NFT imagination space.

If the initial avatar NFT demonstrated the ownership of digital assets represented by NFT by taking advantage of its immutable nature, and the subsequent combination of generative Art and cryptography led to the explosion of generative Art on Art Blocks platform, Loot tries to present the original form of cryptography to players. Subvert NFT's old build logic and redefine community attributes.

As we all know, the creation logic of NFT is usually top-down. Creators create some head pictures, game items or artistic NFT, and then add value to NFT by building and expanding the ecosystem and creating incentives, such as sending airdrops and expanding the fan base, thus increasing the scarcity of NFT. At this point, the value of NFT depends on the team of creators.

Loot is bottom-up construction logic, the pursuit of complete decentralization. Dhof creates a canvas and hands over the brushes to collectors to paint and create their own stories and content, such as writing novels, building meta-universes, creating avatars, building games, etc. Unlike previous NFT projects, the value of Loot is left to the community.

Loot seems to have captured everyone's attention overnight. On September 6th, Loot's total transaction value exceeded $200 million, and it topped the list of transaction value on Opensea for 7 consecutive days, with the highest floor price exceeding 19 ETH. Since then, Loot projects like PLoot, XLoot, BLoot, and AC's VACANCY have sprung up.

Some people compare Loot's impact on NFT to Uniswap's innovation of DEX, but we think Loot is more of a product component than Uniswap is an established product. Product is an application, on which peripheral ecological tools can be built, such as liquidity management tools, listing tools, etc., and the next step of component is product, which means the development of Loot is full of unknown, its future can be very grand, the combination of infinite possibilities, but you can also say that it has not even thought about the direction of development.

Loot is more of an improvisation of NFT, and it's up to the community to write where the show goes.

According to the widely discussed voices, there are two possible directions for Loot: One is that Loot will successfully lead the paradigm shift of NFT and Loot type projects will build spectacular things out of it; Another possibility is that Loot failed to coordinate society and capital, failed to create a valuable narrative and facility, and Loot gradually disappeared into the history of NFT.

Loot's real molding, need to take year as a unit, the current Loot only completed the asset issue this step, ecology is too simple, there is no level, this is also the reason why its heat is difficult to sustain.

As of Dec. 31, Loot's total transaction volume was only $273 million, up only $73 million from the beginning of September, and its floor price dropped to 2.15 ETH.

4. New trends in NFT

Many fans of NFT believe that the NFT will serve as a container for a new world at the nexus between the real world and the metasomes, hosting a market for a wide variety of goods, with art, sports, games, and so on accounting for the same proportion as the real world. So it also points to a neglected blue ocean market - NFT for financial applications.

While the "uniqueness" of NFT is very clear, like DeFi, interchangeability is important to increase the financialization and liquidity of NFT, which is currently being explored in the areas of lending, liquidity and asset management.

Photo credit: Messari

NFT 金融化主要有以下两种方式，一是创建流动性池来为 NFT 提供流动性，如 NFTX 和 NFT20；二是将 NFT 碎片化，使得这些碎片能以同质化 Token 的形式进行交易。

如一幅名为「FeistyDoge」的原版 NFT 照片被碎片化后，该照片的拥有者创建了 Token NFD，总量为 1,000 亿份。上线 3 天的时间里，NFD 上涨了 80 倍，也带动了 FeistyDoge 这张照片以 1.26 亿美元的价格成为了业内最贵的 NFT，而这张图片最初的竞拍价仅 13 ETH。当前市面上比较主流的 NFT 碎片化协议有 Fractional 和 Unic.ly。

Fragmentation is similar to "stock split". By splitting the stocks with large denomination into several stocks with small denomination, on the one hand, people can lower the threshold of purchase, obtain promising assets at a lower cost, and improve the possibility of profit. On the other hand, it also reduces the circulation difficulty of NFT.

例如，CryptoPunks 的地板价对于大部分人来说非常昂贵，通过 NFT 碎片化平台将 1 个或多个 NFT 打包，生成 ERC20 Token 后在 DEX 交易，散户可以在二级市场以较小的金额参与，对 CryptoPunks 的大户或稀有 NFT 的持有者来说，则是提供了一种新的流动性，从而变现手中昂贵的 NFT。

比较有意思的是，小圈文化似乎在 NFT 碎片化领域找到了合适的生存土壤，比如一帮志同道合的人，可能会在牵头人的带领下，通过 DAO 组织发起众筹，集体买入某个 NFT，然后凭借出资多少，即可根据拆分后获得的 Token 参与治理。此时，持有某一 NFT 碎片似乎成了一张进圈的通行证或是敲门砖。

2. Chain travel that has become popular in the post-epidemic era

With its strong earning power and outstanding ability to generate wealth, GameFi, which is dominated by Play to Earn (P2E) mode, has become the focus of attention and discussion in the circle by taking over DeFi and NFT in q2 2021.

A game named Axie Infinity has made a huge impact in Southeast Asia. Some residents who lost their jobs due to the epidemic started to obtain stable income through this game. Therefore, we see a trend that the next generation of crypto assets will give full play to financial attributes, playability and Meme characteristics. Thus improving lifestyles, reshaping societies and relations of production, and perhaps even reshaping the world.

GameFi, or swim in a broader sense, actually is not a new concept in 2021, early in the 18th and 19th, circle is in search of a block chain landing direction, in addition to the financial, to swim and was a dense mentioned vocabulary, but suffer from infrastructure constraints, coupled with the chain of economic models and playability, appeal to players is very general, As the market bears, also quiet down.

In 2021, first of all, the market is in a bull market environment, with capital, enthusiasm and demand to explore and participate in new things. The successive outbreaks of DeFi and NFT provide survival soil for GameFi, which integrates the characteristics of the two. Second, technological development promotes the development of imagination. Games like Wax and Harmony, Ronin's side chain built by Axie Infinity, and Immutable is a Layer 2 solution designed for NFT and chain games. In addition, the epidemic has restricted people's activities indoors. Games, of course, quickly evolved into something more important than entertainment.

After the implementation of the concept of the meta-universe, it Outlines a virtual feast for us, and games, as an extension of the real world and a destination for social gatherings, naturally become a more intuitive window for us to understand the meta-universe.

1. What is GameFi?

GameFi refers to a business model with the core of P2E (Play to Earn), which has attracted wide attention from the outside world due to the explosion of Axie Infinity, a blockchain game. It presents decentralized financial products in the form of games and gamify DeFi rules. The core of NFT of game prop derivatives is to return the ownership of game digital assets to players and solve the problem of mutual trust between game manufacturers and players.

GameFi is summarized as an equation, that is, GameFi= DeFi+NFT+ games. Specifically, DeFi is the core of GameFi, NFT is the necessary means of decentralization, and games are the shell of GameFi.

2. A year by leaps and bounds

Since June, the popularity of Axie Infinity has ignited the discussion of GameFi, and also set off a P2E boom. For eight days in July, Axie Infinity surpassed the $9.23 million daily average of Honor of Kings, the most popular mobile game of all time.

Google Trends shows a significant increase in global searches for Play to Earn, NFT Games and more in early July.

Credit: Google Trends

New GameFi projects are springing up and the number of on-chain interactions is growing rapidly. For the full year of 2021, GameFi's total transaction volume topped $44.7 billion, and its number of unique active wallets surpassed DeFi in the summer to become a major contributor to the total number of DApps users. The peak occurred in the week of November 29, when the number of weekly active wallets reached 9.91 million. As we entered late December, the market cooled. In the week of December 27, GameFi's weekly active wallets dropped to 6.11 million, but this was an increase of 2,819% compared to the beginning of the year.

Number of weekly unique active wallets interacting with smart contracts

Data source: OKLink

Compared to other DApps, linked games are more focused on a silky experience due to The high frequency of interaction. However, due to The high cost of ethereum Gas and congestion, some influential projects such as The Sandbox, Decentraland and CryptoKitties are still running on it. However, some of them are already looking to migrate, and the new ones are more likely to choose BSC, Solana, Polygon, etc., while the old ones like WAX are still one of the most popular blockchains.

According to 798 GameFi project data, linked games are distributed on ethereum, WAX, BSC, Polygon, Solana, OEC and other public chains, covering turn-based, sandbox, card, RPG, MMO, competitive and other major genres. Among the top 50 (multi-chain stacking), There are 10 projects running on Ethereum, 26 on BSC, 9 on WAX, 5 each on Polygon and Solana, 2 each on Cardano, and 1 each on Flow, Harmony, and OEC.

In 2021, GameFi raised 201 deals totaling nearly $4 billion, The top 7 finders are Forte ($910 million), Sorare ($730 million), Dapper Labs ($556 million), Mythical Games ($225 million), Zepeto ($189 million), Sky Mavis ($152 million) and Animoca Brands ($139 million).

Image credit: Dove Metrics

Compared with previous years, the financing of chain games in 2021 has significantly increased both in terms of total financing amount and single financing event.

In addition, in order to promote the development of GameFi, various institutions, companies and project parties have launched special funds. For example, Gala Games will deploy 1 billion DOLLARS for game development in South Korea, and French mobile game developer Voodoo will invest 200 million dollars in blockchain Games. Bitkraft launches a $75 million fund for online games...

The rise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) such as Yield Guild Games, Merit Circle, 3D Gamers Guild, GuildFi, and others has also provided a new way for GameFi to raise money.

GameFi's high point in 2021 is driven by a combination of increased popularity, continued funding flows, increased user penetration, and further growth in media exposure.

3. Stage of chain game & AMP; Phenomenal product

Many people attribute the rise of GameFi to the launch of THE P2E model and see it as an evolution of the game business model driven by blockchain technology compared to the traditional "Free to Play" game industry. Under P2E, blockchain technology ensures ownership of in-game assets, turning the game from a one-way purchase into a two-way investment.

据悉，与游戏相关的智能合约互动的独立日活跃钱包（UAW）数量增长了 6,566%，从 2020 第三季度的 2.3 万增至 2021 第四季度的 154 万。与 DeFi 类似，GameFi 在经历了爆发后，也出现了诸如可玩性差、经济模型难持久、治理滞后等问题，12 月后大部分链游的 NFT 和 Token 价格大幅回落，玩家数、交易额等也出现了跳水。

We believe that we are currently in the second stage of the development of linked games. The first stage is only the initial stage of NFT, such as CryptoKitties; the second stage is linked games 1.0 with P2E as the core; and the third stage is linked games 2.0 with DeFi+NFT+ metasverse fully integrated.

在链游 2.0 阶段，其金融属性和游戏属性会大大增强，例如游戏在现行的 GameFi 模式下，随着 Token 流通量增多，可玩性变差，其 Token 抛压严重，P2E 就会不可持续，而到了 2.0，金融机制设计上会有极大的优化，不仅能为数字资产提供更多的场景和互动，还可能融合 DAO 等形式。而在游戏属性方面，游戏画面会变得更为精美，关卡的设置也会更加复杂，传统游戏大厂也会跑步入场，出现 3A 大作，持续吸引玩家。

At the same time, the ecosystem of linked games is growing, including game guilds, initial game publishing platforms, underlying infrastructure, developer tools, and more.

Looking back on 2021, there have also been a number of phenomenon products in The chain games segment, including turn-based games such as Axie Infinity and Illuvium, Sandbox games such as The Sandbox and Decentraland. Card Games like Gods Unchained, game distribution platforms like Gala Games...

· P2E trendsetter -- Axie Infinity

In July 2021, Axie Infinity became popular, igniting the discussion of GameFi and also setting off a boom of P2E. Over the past year, Axie Infinity ranked third in DApps and blockchain revenue with $1.266 billion in protocol revenue, behind Ethereum and Filecoin.

Image credit: Token Terminal

If only the agreement income of DApp is compared, Axie Infinity takes the first place with absolute advantage, 3.4 times that of the second OpenSea, and exceeds a number of well-known Dapps, such as dYdX, Pancake Swap, MetaMask, etc. With $1.266 billion in annual revenue from deals, it accounted for 43% of the Top 30 DApps' total revenue from deals ($2.93 billion).

Data source: Token Terminal

2021 年第四季度，Axie Infinity 在生态上有了进一步的发展，其上线了 Ronin 侧链 DEX Katana，并推出了 Ronin 生态系统 Token RON。截至 12 月 31 日，Ronin 侧链的总锁仓量为 11.7 亿美元。

Photo source:OKLink

Compared to its peak, Axie Infinity's daily transaction volume has dropped to mid-July 2021 levels, and NFT sales on Ronin's chain have also fallen to low levels, with daily active addresses below 300,000, down 70% from Axie Infinity's peak user activity, It is inevitable that Axie Infinity is also in the throes of transition. Its founders are clearly aware of this, having previously stated that each Axie is a ticket to an ever-expanding collection of experiences, and that one of Axie Infinity's goals is to transform it into an ecosystem created by outside game studios and community developers.

Photo source:OKLink

· Buying land in The meta-universe -- The Sandbox

Virtual land transactions, one of blockchain's earlier use cases, have been tepid until hitching a ride on the metasimes in recent months. Led by The Sandbox and Decentraland, land transactions have peaked in value, quantity, unit price and many others have claimed that metacosmic land is The next big thing in NFT.

As a key asset in GameFi, virtual land is considered to be a mapping of land in the real world. The concept of land emphasizes growing together with the game world. After purchasing land, players can use tools to create scenes and buildings on their land, which will attract more new players to visit the land. Because it is an NFT asset, each piece of land is unique and limited in number.

老牌元宇宙项目 The Sandbox，背靠 Animoca Brands 这一知名手游开发商，又于 11 月 2 日完成了由软银 Vision Fund 2 领投的 9,300 万美元的融资，再结合与一众名人、品牌、IP 合作，拉动各个圈子的人进入游戏的同时，也让土地销售、 Token 价格等水涨船高。

The Sandbox surpassed $280 million in total sales in 2021, including $159 million in November, a 16-fold increase from The previous month. December was down 38% due to The underperformance of The overall GameFi sector, but it still posted nearly $99.9 million in sales. In terms of the number of independent buyers, November also showed a significant increase compared with August, September and October. During August and October, the number of independent buyers fluctuated between 1,850 and 1,950. In November, the number of independent buyers broke the 6,500 mark and reached a record high of 6,869 in December.

The Sandbox sales

Data source: OKLink

The Sandbox 的欢迎程度从其 Token 价格上也能看出，SAND 在 11 月 25 日突破了 8.4 美元，30 日的时间里上涨了 937%，总市值接近 75 亿美元。截至 12 月 31 日，SAND 暂报 6.1 美元，较高点缩水了 27%，总市值降至 56 亿美元。为了减少与游戏交互时高昂的交易费用和网络拥堵问题，The Sandbox 计划于 2022 年迁移至 Polygon，并推出 DAO。

Photo source:OKLink

· On-chain Steam -- Gala Games

Gala Games is a decentralized gaming social platform and a blockchain game development company. By launching different types of blockchain Games, players can have ownership of NFT assets while playing Games. Both Gala Games' own Games and those developed by third-party game makers are available on the platform, making it similar to a game distribution platform like Steam.

So far, Gala Games has launched eight Games, Back to Earth: Back to Town Star, Spider Tanks, Echoes of Empire, Last Expedition, Legacy, Mirandus and The Walking Dead. Empires, involving simulation management, MMORPG, strategy, tower defense, PVP and other game elements.

Unlike traditional gaming platforms, Gala Games offers financial incentives that empower players to participate in ecosystem governance and game rule design, as well as earning dividends for growing with the platform. GALA rose as high as $0.719 (Nov. 26) during the GameFi frenzy, up 3,684% from $0.019 four months ago.

At $0.449 as of Dec. 31, GALA is down 38% from its high, but still up nearly 300 times since the start of the year, a stunning gain.

According to OKLink's annual List of Token gains 2021, GALA ranked second and third in terms of unit price and total market value, respectively, among the top 500 items ranked by market capitalization.

OKLink drawing

4. Challenges and prospects of GameFi

To be sure, GameFi has become one of the hottest areas in the industry, with several well-known game makers including Ubisoft and Zynga getting involved. Unlike traditional game manufacturers, GameFi endows players with more power. Players can participate in the optimization and modification of the game, and they can choose the direction of the game upgrade by voting, so that they can have a better game experience, and the interaction and engagement between players and the game is also higher.

In the context of the DAO trend, games are no longer the property of a single company, but the product of both players and developers, whose value is completely driven by the market; In addition to being able to play games, the P2E's incentive model is also a big selling point for GameFi.

但是 GameFi 仍面临诸多挑战，例如监管的不确定性，NFT 为许多司法辖区带来了新的难题，围绕 NFT 游戏和收藏品专利性的困惑需业内进一步探索， Token 也可能有被视为证券的风险，当然技术限制、用户体验亟待提升、行业标准缺失、准入门槛较高等也是制约 GameFi 发展的因素。

The short-term popularity of GameFi also spawned a lot of Ponzi schemes or frauds in the industry, which also led to the entry of some game giants and met with resistance from traditional world players. As far as the current chain game 1.0 is concerned, the chain game industry will also usher in a round of impact and reshuffle. Some GameFi may be eliminated from the market, and the qualitative change of the industry is coming.

Next stop, ____?

In 2021, the crypto industry experienced many landmark events, including bitcoin's first $60,000 price, NFT's $91.8 million auction price, Coinbase's successful ipo, Tesla, Twitter, MicroStrategy and other public companies embracing crypto assets, Bitcoin officially became legal tender in El Salvador, the first Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs were both approved in Canada, and the first Bitcoin futures ETF was approved in the United States. The total market value of cryptocurrency briefly broke through the $3 trillion mark. DeFi, New Public chain, NFT, Meme, GameFi and other sectors broke out one after another.

OKLink drawing

So what will happen to the crypto industry in 2022?

Trend 1 Bitcoin is at a tipping point for mainstream entry, and the gap between Ethereum and Bitcoin will narrow

2021 is obviously a breakthrough year for crypto assets. Whether it is institutional acceptance, or retail adoption rate, or even the inclusion of Bitcoin into the legal tender system at the national level, it can be said that Bitcoin has undergone qualitative changes in the past two years.

Global central banks helped to increase investors' risk appetite, and compared with 2017, when Bitcoin seemed to break through $20,000 "on a single stroke" and then quickly fell back, this year's blockchain has provided support for the continued strength of the market, both in terms of underlying logic and application. It can be seen that crypto assets have entered the public's attention, and Bitcoin, as the largest crypto asset, is also at the critical point of large-scale transformation into the mainstream.

However, as the mainstream institutions and investors are starting to embrace and adopt encryption assets, and use them as a portfolio diversity increased after a supplementary financial products, the price of the currency began is closely related to the stock market has become, and the federal reserve in 2022 table rates and subsequent behavior, may add a little to encrypt the market uncertainty, But any market goes through booms and busts, and the narrative and landscape for crypto assets, led by Bitcoin, has opened up.

In 2021, Ethereum rose 399% for the year, compared with bitcoin's annual gain of less than 60%. The EXCHANGE rate of ETH/BTC rose 212% in 2021 to close at 0.07956.

At the start of 2021, bitcoin's market share was 68%, Ethereum's 11%, and ethereum's market capitalization was $539.4 billion and $84 billion, respectively, according to the data. By the end of the year, bitcoin's market share had fallen to 38%, while ETH's had risen to 19%, giving them a two-to-one market cap ratio of $892.6 billion to $441.7 billion.

Given the growing popularity of Bitcoin as a store of value and ethereum's on-chain ecosystem's potential to transform PoS, it is likely that the gap between bitcoin and Ethereum's market cap will continue to narrow in 2022.

Trend 2 multi-chain pattern is more mature, application chains emerge, cross-chain bridge demand increases, Layer 2 ushered in a vigorous development

In 2021, the embryonic form of a multi-chain ecosystem was revealed. Although the mainstream status of Ethereum could not be shaken, Polygon, BSC, Avalanche and other ethereum chains all ushered in a period of rapid development in this year, and DeFi, NFT, GameFi and other chains showed a trend of multi-chain deployment.

We believe the Solidity language, EVM framework and ERC standards will remain the mainstream. After all, the key to public sector competition is ecological barriers, not technical barriers. Ethereum has years of ecological legacy and if other public sectors are to go beyond it, they will have to provide a better experience that is compatible with Ethereum.

Of course, application chains will also emerge in 2022. After all, the existing blockchain performance and architecture are difficult to accommodate the diversity of DApps. If a single platform is adopted, DApps will compete for limited resources on the chain, and a small number of applications will crash the network in extreme cases.

In addition, the contradiction between universality and particularity makes it difficult to "go all over the world in one chain". Chain from the perspective of industry evolution, many share the same user group phenomenon also will be reduced with the strengthen of industry, the direction of the chain and the user will appear breakdown, this also means that there might be some chain specialize in certain types of application, or an application of a chain, similar to the Flow, Immutable X, Ronin, and so on and so forth, will only a few.

As of December 31, the TVL of Layer 2 exceeded $5.6 billion, among which The Optimistic Rollup of Arbitrum accounts for the majority of the share, although Optimistic Rollup system projects occupy the first-mover advantage, But come 2022, we'll see ZK Rollup get even more attention.

The prosperity of multi-chain pattern and application chain will also put forward higher requirements for cross-chain. Cross-chain bridge has made considerable progress in 2021, and is still in the stage of strong rise. It is an incremental market with infinite potential and a rigid market that cannot be underestimated in the industry, but the accompanying security problems can not be ignored.

Trend 3 Institutions embrace DeFi, and regulators pay more attention to DeFi compliance development

DeFi, after enjoying the initial dividend period, also encountered problems such as reduced incentives and reduced yields, and users were accustomed to "digging and selling" rather than participating in project construction. After experiencing the DeFi peak in February and the consolidation in the summer, the agreement led by OHM and others quickly attracted the attention of the market. But it remains to be seen whether these agreements can continue to lead DeFi, or whether a later-comer will follow.

While DeFi apps are not currently competing with traditional finance, this could change in the future, especially as DeFi has great potential in high-cost businesses that typically offer higher margins to traditional finance, which means institutions will explore DeFi more.

In 2021, regulatory voices against DeFi began to become more frequent. The BIS notes that DeFi's "severe" vulnerabilities could undermine financial stability if they become widespread, either from unintermediated lending schemes or from Stablecoin liquidity problems, and that policymakers should take advantage of DeFi's centralisation to regulate the industry.

美国 SEC 的主席 Gary Gensler 也表示，DeFi 可以提供「真正的创新」，但如果没有监管合规，该行业将无法生存。此外，Gensler 认为 Stablecoin 使得生态更加系统高效，但它也让世界各地的人们使用它成为洗钱和避税的工具，根据其说法， Stablecoin 占到了加密市场交易的 80%。

从链上数据来看， Stablecoin 的总供应量已经从 2021 年年初的 209.9 亿美元增加到了 1,064.5 亿美元，飙升了 407%，主要归因于高频交易的加密公司惯常使用 Stablecoin 作为抵御波动的方式，而散户交易者也倾向于使用风险较小的 Stablecoin 用于 DeFi 挖矿以获取收益，另外衍生品市场的增长也推动了 Stablecoin 。

显然 Stablecoin 引起了监管者的重视，它们将在 2022 年面临更多的审查。

Photo source:OKLink

Trend 4 NFT and chain games integrate into the metasverse, accelerating expansion

2021 can be said to be the breakout year of NFT. Phenomenal projects such as CryptoPunks and BAYC have huge sales volume, and their returns are often calculated by tens or even hundreds of times. The high returns further attract more users to flood into the NFT industry.

At the same time, under the epidemic situation, the giants of FMCG, luxury goods, car companies, fashion brands, entertainment and other traditional industries are also actively seeking new growth points for brands, and the thriving NFT industry has become a new way to generate income for brands, which also accelerates the exit of NFT.

In 2022, NFT will be more closely connected to the real world. Any real world data can be integrated into NFT and have an impact on NFT itself. NFT public chain and Layer 2 will also bring expansion to NFT.

In addition to the art and collectibles craze, Axie Infinity has created a P2E game that can lead millions of users to interact with each other, demonstrating the potential of chain games with the right economic model to motivate them. In 2022, we will see an accelerated convergence of NFT, DeFi, and linked games, new games with improved economic models, games that are not driven by crypto native developers, and traditional developers moving into the space.

With a number of big names and celebrities getting involved, such as Facebook rebranding itself as "Meta", Google, Apple, Microsoft and other big tech companies are all set to launch hardware and software related to the metasverse, which is being touted as a big theme for 2022.

With a total market cap of $27.5 billion, Meta's market cap of $920 billion, the gaming industry's market cap of $2 trillion, and Web 2.0 companies' market cap of $14.800 billion have a lot of potential. Goldman Sachs estimates that up to $1.35 trillion will be invested over the next few years to develop metasverse technology.

Meta-universe is a virtual space based on the mapping of the real Internet world in the future, and its scope will be expanded from pan-entertainment to every corner of the Internet. In 2022, NFT will become an important infrastructure of the metasomes. Its uniqueness and irresubstitution will also allow people to map things in the real world to the metasomes. The core and extension of NFT will have great imagination in 2022. DeFi+NFT+ games combined with chain games will become an intuitive window for users to understand the meta-universe, which will affect people in social, financial, life and other aspects in the future.

Trend 5 The DAO era starts

In the last two months of 2021, Constitution DAO led an idealistic "revolution" that failed, and the burgeoning PEOPLE attracted a large number of imitators and speculators, but DAO's appeal was already prominent.

As a group connected by "fate" and organized around tasks, DAO enables its members to have the right to speak through governance, and the flat framework for building workflows naturally endow DAO with common goals or values. Therefore, DAO is considered as a new cooperative organization in line with the current cyberspace and Web 3.0 trend.

截至 1 月 5 日，DeppDao 统计的 188 个 DAO 以及 165 个组织的总资产管理规模达到了 119 亿美元，对比 2021 年上半年，DAO 沉淀的资金规模增长了 1,418%，组织成员和 Token 持有者的累计数量超过了 130 万人，整个生态欣欣向荣。

In 2021, we saw DAO governance become standard for on-chain projects, with a growing number of proponents arguing that DAOs are more accessible and have lower barriers to entry than companies. Because daOs can be combined with any outlet, they are given unlimited imagination.

After the development in 2021, DAO has covered development tools, services, social, media, collection, creation and other aspects. Currently, there are three recognized DAO modes in the market:

· Protocol governance DAO: the most engaged and dominant role in DAO track. Community users vote on on-chain proposals through their own assets to decide whether the proposals can be approved. For example, Uniswap often decides on Token allocation and network deployment through DAO voting.

· Investment DAO is investment-oriented and mainly serves as the function of early value discovery. Compared with traditional institutions, DAO is endowed with financial attributes and investment preference. It can obtain stronger advantages than traditional investors by virtue of members' social network, and it also has more advantages in flexibility and speed. The ability to raise large amounts of money in a short period of time without the constraints of traditional VCS, such as YGG Guild, MetaCartel DAO, PleasrDAO, etc.

· applied DAO refers to the DAO that provides services, social networking, media and other vertical applications. Due to its combination of traditional world and blockchain features, it is also considered as the DAO most likely to go out of the loop, such as BanklessDAO, Mirror, and daos initiated by major communities.

By 2022, we believe that all kinds of SERVICES of DAO will be more perfect, and we will launch standardized templates, frameworks and other underlying services for DAO creation and operation, so that encryption users can start a DAO in a fool way. At the same time, DAO will also face more challenges, such as the balance between chain and chain, material incentives, loose organizational structure, communication and decision-making efficiency, etc. However, it is obvious that all major organizations and institutions will participate in the paradigm shift of DAO.

Trend 6 From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0

As the buzz around Web 3.0 intensifies, so does the buzz around it. According to Google Trends, global searches for the term "Web 3.0" have skyrocketed over the past 12 months, with a particularly sharp increase in November and December. Web 3.0 even became a popular term at a U.S. House of Representatives crypto finance hearing.

Compared with Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, Web 3.0 is still in the vision at the present stage. Although it claims to solve the problem that most control of the network is concentrated in the hands of a few centralized companies, and users' privacy and value generated by users in the process of interaction are returned to users, but the concept is slightly general. Making it highly controversial in 2021.

Tech titans like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey have blasted Web 3.0, leading to a war of words with a16Z co-founder Chris Dixon and Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong over whether Web 3.0 represents technological innovation. It can be seen that the market's perception of Web 3.0 is polarized at this stage.

This is mainly due to the fact that the definition and application of Web 3.0 have not reached a consensus. Different people seem to have different views on what changes Web 3.0 will bring to human life and what application scenarios and values it will have. In addition, due to the rapid outbreak of the concept of Web 3.0 and the post-epidemic era in which demand has been suppressed for a long time, the public chooses to follow the trend in a short period of time driven by the emotion of Fomo, although they do not know much about the concept.

In fact, the debate over Web 3.0 is helping to drive it forward. Data show that the development of a technology, when its penetration rate is 20%-50%, is in the stage of rapid growth; if the penetration rate is greater than 50%, it will enter the deceleration range; while if the penetration rate exceeds 70%, it will enter the extremely slow growth or even stagnation. Now that the Internet has reached this ceiling, the emergence of Web 3.0 May be the key to breaking the logjam and continuing the development.

If you take a closer look at Web 3.0, some of its infrastructure is already taking shape: payment tools like MetaMask, domain name system ENS, storage tools like Filecoin and Arweave, content distribution platforms like Mirror, Decentralized social tools include Discord and Telegram.

Many organizations and organizations are already working on Web 3.0, and more large companies are slowly embracing it and testing the waters in this area. In 2022, we will see more convergence and composability of DApps, giving users more complete control over their identity and assets in the crypto world.