2018 is almost over now. The year was long and actually very rough, as the bear market caused a lot of issues this year. Now, we reunite to talk about the trends that dominated 2018 beyond the most obvious one. A recent article published by Coindesk, which was written by Brian Flynn, an expert in non-fungible tokens, sees the trends for this year and some for the next year.

When one thinks about non-fungible tokens, it is easy to think about CryptoKitties. The app of collectible cats was one of the largest hits of 2018. However, a lot more has happened in the year and Flynn listed ten trends that dominated the year.

The first trend was that new standards for non-fungible tokens have appeared. Ethereum’s ERC-721, which CryptoKitties used, was the most prominent one and this has not changed during the year, however, there are some other tokens that you may have heard about.

Ethereum ERC0998 is another token standard, which was created to save on gas costs. Another similar token that has reached some popularity is Enjin’s ERC-1155. They are basically evolutions of the original ERC-721 tokens.

The second trend was the new marketplaces for NFTs. After the launch of CryptoKitties, the market started to expand very quickly this year and other markets emerged like OpenSea and RareBits, which appeared soon at the beginning of the year.

Other tools like FanBits were also very important for the industry. This specific tool helped the users to create their own NFTs. However, these platforms all failed to gain so much attention as CryptoKitties did back when it was still very famous.

Another important trend was the dawn of the user-generated markets for artists. Three platforms are cited as very relevant by the article: Dada.NYC, Rare Art Labs and SuperRare. These platforms used programmable contracts to let the artists that created the pieces to earn their fees on second-hand purchases of their assets and even let people tokenize art assets.

After 2018, you will never have to actually buy art pieces as a whole because the tokenization of these assets allows the users to only purchase a small part of them today.

Record-setting sales were another important trend in the year. Before the bear market clawed the market, NFTs were sold at very high prices. For instance, one CryptoKitty was sold for $170,000 USD, a simply incredible value. A virtual real estate in Decentraland, a virtual city product, was sold for even more, $200,000 USD. This year, digital assets started to be really valuable like they never were actually allowed to be before.

Some of the other main trends are second-layer experiences. For instance, CryptoKitties unleashed KittyVerse, which let many third party devs create and program new services. The two most high-profile ones were KittyHats (hats for your cats) and the racing game KittyRace. Unfortunately, these products were not as successful as the main program (no other product actually was).

The sixth trend may have been called “Intellectual Property” by Brian Flynn, but it may as well be called “controversy”. CryptoKitties announced celebrity kitties at the beginning of the year but the creator of the brand, Axiom Zen, wanted to sue the company. A lot of issues happened and the team actually decided to simply give on the idea at the end.

Another trend was that CryptoKitties survived, despite losing some of its user base and a lot of value and thrived. At the end of 2018, the team was able to get more $15 million USD in investments. Now, Dapper Labs, which controls the IP, is already planning on how to improve CryptoKitties to keep the brand alive in the future.

The year also had better use experience tools, a move that was very popular among the whole crypto market. While most apps needed MetaMask in order to be used, some other companies started to get creative and used their own services.

Another part of this move was companies releasing products to help the customers like it was the case will Coinbase Wallet, Opera, Trust Wallet and Vault. They all released their own versions of softwares that looked a lot like MetaMask to help people play games on the blockchain.

It was also an important trend that Ethereum faced scalability issues, so many companies simply decided to use some other blockchains like the EOS network. Mythical Games, which is building a game on the EOS blockchain, was one of these companies.

Finally, the last trend of the year was Gods Unchained. The expert was keen on believing that Gods Unchained, a new trading card game on the blockchain that was backed by the giant Coinbase and developed by the Fuel Games studio, was one of the most important projects of the year.

The game will be set on the Ethereum blockchain and the cards will be NFTs. However, the game will be 100% off chain, which can help against scalability issues.

The article also cited three important trends for 2019. The first one was the next year see a huge battle between centralized and decentralized players in the industry. Also, stablecoins will be fundamental for the NFT industry because they are a more stable way to get paid as cryptos have a very volatile nature.

According to the article, the second trend is that “work and play” will be deeply intertwined. People will be able to get money from playing games as they might mine or stake tokens while they play. They will get money to have fun.

Finally, celebrities and merchandise is the last trend that there is a chance that we will see in 2019. According to Flynn, many ideas of this type have already appeared so far and companies like Genies raised $10 million to do it. Celebrities will get into the blockchain industry for once and for all, or at least that is what the article claims.

Follow our blog to know all the trend for the crypto industry in 2019.

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