Bankless: Five Major Predictions for Non-fungible Tokens in 2025

What are the major milestones for the future in the Non-fungible Token space?

Written by: William M. Peaster, Bankless

Compilation: Five Baht, Golden Finance

Driven by record-breaking minting activities and a growing number of use cases, Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) solidified their position as a cornerstone of crypto innovation in 2024.

The new year promises to push the boundaries of Non-fungible Token to the extreme, as real-world applications drive mainstream adoption, cultural breakthroughs redefine the concept of ownership, and the field is poised for even greater accomplishments in 2025 as momentum grows across the board!

From infrastructure improvements to price surges, here are five bold predictions that I believe will define the next chapter of the Non-fungible Token (NFT) revolution.

New minting records

According to Electric Capital’s annual developer report, the Non-fungible Token (NFT) sector has experienced its most active year to date.

Thanks to the low transaction fees of Ethereum Layer 2 solutions and the increasing competition from alternative Layer 1, creators have launched more Non-fungible Token contracts than ever before, and have gained equally strong demand: the minting volume, trading volume, and the number of active minting wallets have reached historic highs in 2024.

Looking ahead to 2025, the crypto space should be ready for another wave of Non-fungible Token innovation and activity. The renewed interest from creators and consumers, coupled with improved user experiences and groundbreaking apps for consumers, should set the stage for unprecedented growth.

We will keep an eye out for new developments in the Abstract ecosystem and the continued rise of on-chain proxies such as Virtuals and Wayfinder as a frontier for Non-fungible Token adoption.

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Infrastructure will play a bigger role

Although Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) are most commonly associated with the proliferation of digital artwork, we anticipate that less obvious use cases for non-fungible assets will gain the most adoption by 2025.

Stablecoin issuer Liquity recently integrated Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) into its V2, allowing users to transfer or trade their collateralized debt positions. Polymarket’s conditional NFTs facilitate the creation of prediction markets, while the emerging AI agent creation platform Virtuals uses NFTs in its Immutable Contribution Vault (ICV) system to track contributions.

Non-fungible tokens will continue to be a comfortable format for artists to distribute their creations, but expect this transformative technology to play a greater role in real-world on-chain applications.

Cambrian Game Explosion

In October, Starknet partnered with Cartridge’s on-chain game guru 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, with up to 867 transactions processed per second.

The emergence of abstract account functionality has greatly improved the user experience for crypto newcomers. Although mainstream laggards have not yet widely adopted crypto games, this field provides players with ownership of in-game items and introduces token incentives, enabling them to explore new data while promoting financial participation.

As the blockchain infrastructure continues to improve in 2025, we expect the increasing popularity of on-chain games to drive L2 to reach +1k TPS for the first time in history.

Bitcoin Puppets will usher in a breakthrough

Imagine this: it’s November 2025 and BTC has just broken through $500,000. The US, under the leadership of Donald Trump, continues to accumulate BTC as a strategic reserve. There is no sign of this momentum slowing down.

In this era of newfound abundance, BTC whales may try to flaunt their wealth through top-tier Non-fungible Token projects (just as Ether OG did during the last bull market). As a consensus game that is leading in the niche Ordinals field and has strong community support, Bitcoin Puppets has a unique advantage to capture the largest share of these inflows.

Under such favorable conditions, Bitcoin Puppets may not only ride the bull market wave, but also consolidate its position as one of the top 5 non-fungible token collections by the end of the year.

CryptoPunks sets new records

Some of the biggest Non-fungible Token sales in the cryptocurrency world are CryptoPunks, and the ‘Alien’ variety of this PFP series firmly occupies the top spot on the sales leaderboard! Alien Punk 5822 sold for a record-breaking 8k ETH (24 million USD) near the peak of the Non-fungible Token bubble in 2022, with two of these highly sought-after collectibles changing hands in 2024 for a staggering eight-figure price.

We expect ETH to recover in 2025 as institutions and individuals alike look to increasingly access the decentralized financial system and on-chain computing. With these profound tailwinds, a record-breaking Alien CryptoPunk sale could emerge.