Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Compiled by: Five Baht, Golden Finance

Driven by record minting activity and growing use cases, NFTs solidified themselves as The cornerstone of crypto innovation.

The new year promises to push the boundaries of NFTs to their extremes, as practical applications drive mainstream adoption and cultural breakthroughs redefine the concept of ownership. Achieve greater achievements in the year!

From infrastructure improvements to soaring prices, here are five bold predictions that I believe will define the next chapter of the NFT revolution.

The NFT space has had its most active year yet, according to Electric Capital’s annual developer report.

Thanks to the low transaction fees of Ethereum’s Layer 2 solutions and increasing competition from alternative Layer 1s, creators are launching more NFT contracts than ever before and receiving equally strong returns Demand: Minting volume, trading volume, and the number of active minting wallets all hit all-time highs in 2024.

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

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

While NFTs are most easily associated with image-heavy on-chain collectibles, we expect that non-obvious non-fungible use cases will Maximum adoption in 2025.

Stablecoin issuer Liquity recently integrated NFTs for V2, enabling users to transfer or trade their collateralized debt positions. Polymarket’s conditional NFTs facilitate the creation of betting markets, while 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 expect this transformative technology to play a greater role in actual on-chain applications.

In October, Starknet collaborated with Cartridge’s on-chain game masters to stress test its L2, and in the process set a new L2 Speed ​​record! During the trial period, Starknet’s average fees are only 0.0 per transaction.002 USD and can process up to 867 transactions per second.

The rise of account abstraction features has greatly improved the user experience for crypto newbies, and while mainstream laggards have yet to adopt crypto gaming at scale, the space provides players with ownership of in-game items and introduces token incentives measures that enable it to mine new data while promoting financial participation.

As blockchain infrastructure continues to improve in 2025, we expect the growing popularity of on-chain gaming to push L2 to reach +1k TPS for the first time ever.

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

In this era of newfound abundance, BTC whales may try to show off their wealth through top NFT projects (much like Ether OG did during the last bull run). As a consensus game with a leading position in niche Ordinals and strong community support, Bitcoin Puppets is uniquely positioned to capture the lion's share of these inflows.

With such favorable conditions, Bitcoin Puppets may not only ride the bull market wave, but solidify its status as a top 5 NFT collectible by the end of the year.

Some of the biggest NFT sales in cryptocurrencies have been CryptoPunks, and the “Alien” variety of this PFP series firmly dominates the top of the sales charts! An Alien Punk 5822 sold for a record 8k ETH ($24m) near the peak of the NFT bubble in 2022, with two of these highly sought-after collectibles changing hands in 2024 for eye-popping 8-figure prices.

We expect ETH to recover in 2025 as institutions and individuals alike seek increasing access to decentralized financial systems and on-chain computing. Amid these profound tailwinds, record-setting Alien CryptoPunk sales could be on the cards.