• The Dapp report suggests that 2022 shall be ‘The Year of the Metaverse’ citing the recent shifts in the market trend.
• While the DeFi sector witnessed a bit of slowdown it gained a lot of maturity with strong Layer 1 solutions coming to the forefront.

Although the cryptocurrency market has been currently undergoing a gloomy phase, it’s been a record-breaking year for the blockchain industry. DappRadar, the decentralized application store has recently issued the Dapp industry report highlighting fresh records and milestones in the DApp blockchain space.

The report shows that the blockchain industry has witnessed record-breaking growth in 2021 across different verticals. In comparison to 2020, the usage of the blockchain industry has grown sevenfold times with a record of 2.7 million daily active unique wallets connected to DApps.

NFTs and gaming all the craze

At the centre of the massive blockchain adoption has been non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other blockchain-based games. Undoubtedly, this year’s highlight has been the popular non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which have stormed the crypto space.

NFTs have seen heavy participation from investors and popular personalities across the diaspora. The NFT sales have topped $23 billion amid support from celebrities, big brands, and other sports teams. Strong sales have happened across popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, Atomic Market, and Solanart. 

On the other hand, the Metaverse craze has caught up recently with social media giant Facebook rebranding itself to Meta. Virtual land spaces in the Metaverse have topped to as high as $2.5-million apiece. This is a staggering 500 percent appreciation over the last year while the floor market cap for the collections hitting an estimated $16.7 billion. DappRadar Head of Finance and Research Modesta Masoit said that 2022 shall be ‘The Year of the Metaverse’. He further noted:

We’ve seen crucial progression in the dapp space this year, placing us on the cusp of mass adoption. While 2020 was ‘The Year of DeFi’, 2021 is certainly ‘The Year of NFTs’, with gaming thrown in in bulk over the last quarter. As these three categories converge, 2022 will, I expect, come to be known as ‘The Year of the Metaverse’, with project supporting and helping navigate this complex, cross-chain and cross-category paradigm stealing the spotlight.

The transition in the DeFi space

The summer of 2020 was the period when the DeFi mania picked up. However, this category faced a relative slowdown in 2021 but showed that the sector has been maturing finely.

This year in DeFi we saw several Layer 1 solutions and DeFi apps emerging in the market. Popular solutions like Solana, Avalanche, and Terra, have seen a seven-fold increase in the total value locked (TVL) in the Defi sector. 

Ethereum still has the lion’s share representing 60 percent of DeFi’s total vale locked (TVL). The Binance Smart Chain (BSC) ranks second with $22.5 billion in TVL. The Avalanche blockchain is in the third position with $12.48 billion TVL. Impressively, Terraform Labs is sitting at the fourth position.