Bankless: Five Major Predictions for NFTs in 2025

Bankless

25-01-03 10:20

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Original Article Title: 5 NFT Predictions for 2025

Original Article Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless

Original Article Translation: Wuzhu, Golden Finance

Driven by record-breaking minting activity and the continued growth of use cases, NFTs solidified their position as a 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 with momentum from all sides, the space is set to achieve even greater heights 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 to date.

Benefiting from low transaction fees on Ethereum's layer 2 solutions and increasing competition from alternative layer 1 solutions, creators launched more NFT contracts than ever before and met similar strong demand: minting volume, transaction volume, and the number of active minting wallets all hit historic highs in 2024.

Looking ahead to 2025, the crypto space should brace for another wave of NFT innovation and activity. Rekindled interest from creators and consumers, coupled with improvements in user experience and groundbreaking consumer-facing applications, should set the stage for unprecedented growth.

We will closely monitor new developments in the Abstract ecosystem and the continued rise of on-chain proxies like Virtuals and Wayfinder as the vanguard of NFT adoption.

Infrastructure Will Play a Bigger Role

While NFTs are most commonly associated with the proliferation of image-based on-chain collectibles, we anticipate that less obvious non-fungible use cases will see the most adoption in 2025.

Stablecoin issuer Liquity recently integrated NFTs for V2, enabling users to transfer or trade their collateral debt positions. Polymarket's conditional NFTs have facilitated the creation of prediction markets, and the emerging AI agent creation platform Virtuals uses NFTs in its Immutable Contribution Vault (ICV) system to track contributions.

NFT will continue to be a comfortable format for artists to distribute their creations, but expect this transformative technology to play a larger role in practical on-chain applications.

The Cambrian Explosion of Gaming

In October, Starknet partnered with Cartridge's L2 Gaming Master to stress test its L2 and set a new L2 speed record 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 has greatly improved the user experience for crypto newcomers. Although mainstream laggards have yet to adopt crypto gaming at scale, the sector provides gamers with in-game item ownership and introduces token incentive mechanisms, allowing them to explore new data while promoting financial inclusion.

With blockchain infrastructure continuing to improve in 2025, we expect the increasing popularity of on-chain gaming to drive L2 to its first-ever +1k TPS.

Bitcoin Puppets Poised for Breakthrough

Imagine this: It's November 2025, and BTC has just surpassed $500,000. The United States under the leadership of Donald Trump continues to accumulate BTC as a strategic reserve, and this momentum shows no signs of slowing down.

In this era of newfound abundance, BTC whales may seek to flaunt their wealth through top-tier NFT projects (similar to what Ether OG did during the last bull market). As a consensus game leading in the niche Ordinals space with strong community support, Bitcoin Puppets have a unique advantage to capture the lion's 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 a top 5 NFT collection by the end of the year.

CryptoPunks Poised to Set New Records

Some of the largest NFT sales in cryptocurrency are CryptoPunks, with the "Alien" variant of this PFP series firmly leading the sales charts! An Alien Punk 5822 was sold for a record-breaking 8,000 ETH (24 million USD) near the peak of the 2022 NFT bubble, and two of these highly coveted collectibles changed hands in 2024 at a staggering eight-figure price.

We expect ETH to rebound in 2025 as both institutions and individuals seek greater access to decentralized finance and on-chain computation. With these powerful tailwinds, record-breaking sales of Alien CryptoPunks may occur.