A look at some NFT use cases, with gaming at the top, as NFT trading volume fell from $17B in January 2022 to $400M in November 2022 amid the crypto market drop
Context & Ripple Effects
Wired's year-end survey of NFT use cases lands after a brutal deflation documented across the coverage: Dune Analytics measured a 97% collapse in monthly trading volume from the record $17.2B of January 2022 to $466.9M by September, and CryptoSlam's daily figures show even the holiday season running far below a year earlier, with December 25 volume at $12.9M versus $64.3M on the same day in 2021 (CryptoSlam's day-by-day comparison).
Against that backdrop, the piece's framing matters: gaming sits at the top of the use-case list, which is effectively an argument that NFTs need non-speculative utility to survive a market where trading itself no longer pays. Later DappRadar data in the corpus confirms the arc held — an 81% volume decline through July 2023 alongside a 61% drop in sales, with traders rotating back into cryptocurrencies.
First-order effects
- Projects and marketplaces whose economics depend on trading fees and royalties face collapsing revenue as monthly volume falls from $17B to $400M, forcing reliance on holders rather than flippers.
- Gaming emerges as the primary retention pitch: with speculation unprofitable, studios and platforms are marketing NFTs as in-game assets and utility items instead of tradable collectibles.
Second-order effects
- Traders exit NFTs back into cryptocurrencies — the DappRadar coverage shows sales falling slower than volume, meaning remaining activity concentrates in fewer, more utilitarian transactions.
- Marketplaces and game studios now compete on delivered utility rather than floor-price momentum, shifting development budgets toward playable integrations over launch hype.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the NFT industry structurally consolidates around gaming and other functional uses, while pure collectible speculation becomes a niche — the 2022-2023 volume data suggests the speculative layer was the market, not a feature of it.
The trend: NFTs are transitioning from a speculation-driven trading market to a utility-led one, with gaming positioned as the use case that outlasts the volume collapse.