2023 Annual Review of the Crypto Market: Development Trends in Public Chains, Decentralized Finance, NFTs, and DApps

The crypto market experienced fluctuations in 2023, followed by a significant surge at the end of the year, with various subfields facing new development opportunities. Public chains have regained attention due to the trend of inscriptions; the DeFi market has developed steadily, with the locked value fluctuating around $50 billion; the NFT market has shrunk by 31%, with prices of several well-known projects plummeting; social finance has become a short-term hotspot. This article will review the 2023 crypto market from the perspectives of token prices, public chains, Decentralized Finance, NFTs, and DApps.

Secondary Trading Market: Public Chain Concept Tokens Lead the Surge

Among the top 100 mainstream tokens by market capitalization, the average increase of the top 30 tokens is 512.75%. Among them, INJ has the highest increase, exceeding 2994%, with KAS and RNDR both exceeding 1000%. BTC's increase of 153% ranks 28th.

The top 30 tokens by growth are mostly medium assets ranked 30-50 by market capitalization. By category, there are 10 belonging to the Layer1 concept, 4 belonging to the Layer2 concept, and 6 belonging to the DeFi concept. Most of these tokens have an average daily trading volume of less than 100 million USD, and the overall trading scale is not large.

Public Chains: Avalanche and Solana Show Significant Growth

Considering overall activity and market attention, we selected 10 mainstream public chains for analysis.

The highest average daily active addresses are Tron, BNB Chain, and Bitcoin; the highest average daily transaction counts are Solana, Tron, and Avalanche. The highest annual increase in active addresses is Avalanche, followed by Solana; the highest annual increase in transaction counts is NEAR, followed by Bitcoin and Avalanche.

In terms of trading fees, Ethereum remains the highest at $2.368 billion, followed by Bitcoin at $734 million.

DeFi: Lido's locked assets rank first, new protocols rapidly rise.

The DeFi locked value ( TVL ) increased from 38 billion USD at the beginning of the year to 54.5 billion USD at the end of the year, with an increase of approximately 43%.

Currently, among the top 30 protocols by TVL, Lido is far ahead with $20.52 billion. Maker, AAVE, and JustLend follow closely, with TVL between $6.4 billion and $8.4 billion.

It is worth noting that 7 new protocols have completed the cold start from 0 to 1, entering the top 30 in TVL, including Blast, EigenLayer, Spark, etc. In addition, projects deployed on Solana and Avalanche, such as Jito, Marinade Finance, Benqi, etc., have seen rapid growth in TVL.

In terms of revenue, Maker, Lido, and PancakeSwap rank in the top three, with $103 million, over $50 million, and over $50 million, respectively.

NFT: Trading is active but blue chip project prices have plummeted

In 2023, the market value of NFTs shrank from $23.4 billion to $16.1 billion, a decline of 31.08%. However, trading volume increased by 27.95%, the number of addresses grew by 76.16%, and the total number of projects surged by 196.76%.

The highest total transaction amount is BAYC, reaching 1.703 billion USD, followed by MAYC with 1.258 billion USD. Azuki and Wrapped Cryptopunks stand at 929 million USD and 757 million USD, respectively.

The prices of several well-known projects have plummeted, such as BAYC down 61%, Azuki down 52%, MAYC down 63%, and Doodles down 74%. However, there are also some emerging projects that have seen astonishing gains, such as Opepen Edition, OnChainShiba, and Checks, all of which have increased by over 5000%.

Games and Social DApps: New Applications Show Active Performance but Lack Sustainability

DApps in the gaming and social sectors are receiving a lot of attention. The games with the highest estimated number of annual active addresses include motoDEX, PlayEmber, Sweat Economy, etc.; social apps include Dmail Network, Galxe, Hooked, etc.

These projects generally exhibit two characteristics: first, they lack sustainability, as most projects only maintain high activity levels in the short term; second, they have strong explosive growth, with most completing explosive increases at the end of the year.

From the perspective of the layout of public chains, there have been many active projects on chains such as Polygon, Ethereum, BNB Chain, NEAR, and Base.

Overall, the crypto market in 2023 has experienced ups and downs, but there have been new developments in various segments, laying the foundation for further growth in 2024.