In the past year, nonfungible tokens (NFT) have continued to play an important role in the growing Web3 industry. NFTs started the shift from hype-based drops, to utility projects with long-term value.
A new DappRadar report on the adoption of blockchain and decentralized applications (DApp) in 2022 revealed that the number of NFT sales last year reached 101 million – an increase of 67.57% from the previous year.
According to the report, the Ethereum ecosystem holds the highest position in the NFT ecosystem, holding a 21% market share and more than 21.2 million transactions processed. It is followed by Wax (14.5 million), Polygon (13.3 million) and Solana (12.9 million).
The Solana and ImmutableX ecosystems experienced huge growth from the previous year in terms of transaction activity, with increases of 440% and 315% respectively.
Meanwhile, the data shows no change in the BNB ecosystem, with approximately 1 million transactions for 2021 and 2022.
The dominant category of DApps in various chains has also changed in the past year. By 2021, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications are dominant in all but 2 of the 13 chains used in the report.
However, this year, the main shift towards high-risk games, games and NFT DApps leveled the playing field.
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Additionally, the report highlights Ethereum and Cardano as the blockchains with the most active developers working on the chain, with 223 and 151 active protocols respectively.
While modular blockchains, such as Polkadot and Cosmos, saw network developer activity grow by 16% and 131.7%, respectively.
The importance of NFTs in the Web3 space also spilled over into mainstream culture last year. From its continued adoption by legacy institutions like the NBA to Amazon making a documentary series about NFTs and their collectors.
At the end of last year, China announced the first national NFT market which is a secondary market for digital asset exchange.