
Forkast’s biggest blockchain trends for 2023: blockchain games, NFTs, DAOs and a bet that Web3 will end the cryptocurrency winter
- Traditional companies adopting Web3 could end the cryptocurrency winter, while gaming will drive mass cryptocurrency adoption, industry experts say
- Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) could reach their full potential while non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will gain more ground, they say
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Traditional companies adopting Web3 could end cryptocurrency winter
“The key to the next ‘cryptocurrency summer’ will be mass adoption of Web3 elements by traditional Web2 companies. As this transition accelerates, more attention will be spent on designing interfaces and experiences that are more intuitive for the average user,” Onufriychuk said.

“[We expect to see] significant adoption of decentralised finance (DeFi) by institutions due to permissioned pools and decentralised compliance protocols such as PureFi,” said Slava Demchuk, chief executive officer of AMLBot and compliance protocol PureFi.

“Integration of permissioned DeFi protocols within the back end of traditional banking systems [is necessary] to provide their customers a more attractive and trustless alternative to current financial services,” Demchuk said.
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Gaming will drive mass cryptocurrency adoption
“Gaming will be a major driver [of mass adoption], and more generally, blockchain culture as represented by NFTs of various kinds,” said Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands.

“Both gaming and metaverse applications are following a rapid growth curve and consequently we expect that cryptocurrency user numbers will continue to rise during 2023, despite the ongoing cryptocurrency winter,” McKenna said.

“Gaming is likely to be one of the next areas that innovate things forward,” said Lex Sokolin, head economist at Ethereum software firm ConsenSys.
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DAOs could reach their full potential
“DAOs will perhaps be the most important development trend of 2023 … Participating in [Alien Worlds’] DAO-based elections to a planet’s council enables a player to be elected to the governing council, to play a role in decision-making, and to oversee the expenditure of treasury funds … This kind of new opportunity is already starting to intensify the activity levels in our worldwide community of users,” McKenna said.
“In 2023, new models of governance and collective financial management will be the focus, as DAOs offer a way to address current issues of centralisation and lack of transparency in the cryptocurrency industry. Companies will be drawn to DAOs for their improved accountability and transparency,” xDAO’s Shavlidze said.
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“In terms of applications, we are likely to see growth in tools that enable DAOs to produce useful economic goods. That includes financial tooling for payroll, governance management platforms, and other on-chain collaboration software,” Sokolin said.
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NFTs will gain more ground
“[Next year, I expect] more advanced revenue models for creators beyond forced royalties on secondary market transactions – especially for non-art digital assets – [and] the rise of a wider array of digital asset classes, tokenised almost exclusively as NFTs rather than their fungible counterparts,” CryptoSlam’s Wasinger said.
“We should expect some big names from multiple industries joining in this movement in the next couple of years. For example, mainstream social media platforms and AAA game studios are already experimenting with the use of NFTs,” Corite’s Onufriychuk said.
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“Natively digital economies are starting to emerge, and digital goods like NFTs will continue to evolve. Just like the internet went from flat websites to interactive cloud software, tokens will evolve from being flat digital goods to much more interactive, customised, and intelligent digital on-chain agents. We haven’t seen generative AI interact with Web3 meaningfully, but I suspect the technologies will find promising overlaps,” ConsenSys’ Sokolin said.
