Despite a bear market, crypto’s future is still bright: Crypto in 2023

cointelegraph.com:

2022 was quite the year for crypto. It saw incredible innovation and greater adoption. This progress was accompanied by some major growing pains, including major hacks and scams amid an overall bear market. The unexpected developments that took place towards the year’s end, such as a trend towards the removal of creator royalties and FTX’s collapse, will reshape the space in the year to come, requiring users and projects to adapt to a changing landscape. Considering all that the space has lived through in 2022, here are the biggest predictions for crypto in 2023.

NFTs could become more widely adopted as technological standards and as utility-based primitives, leaving behind the highly speculative age of the PFP, collections of 10K or 1 of 1s.

In October 2022, many major marketplaces such as LooksRare and MagicEden began to make creator royalties optional or remove them entirely, meaning creators would lose a major source of revenue. Given royalties are a large part of what draws and keeps creators in Web3, this can threaten the use case of NFTs as art. New technological standards are likely to arise to solve the problem of royalties, but in the meantime, NFT technology will filter into other industries. 

Even prior to the royalty debate, as the market became saturated with countless collections lacking clear utility, it became clear that the use cases for NFT primitives would expand. Where in 2022 we saw NFTs become more widely used in entertainment, gaming and sports, 2023 is likely to usher NFTs into DeFi. DeFi projects already see the need for tokenized data when it comes to security, convenience and transaction speed — and NFTs are the optimal solution. DeFi-oriented NFTs will demonstrate that the fundamental technology