A look at some NFT utility cases like gaming, as NFT trading volume fell from $17B in January 2022 to $400M in November 2022, amid the crypto market slump
Joel Khalili / Wired :
Context & Ripple Effects
By the time Joel Khalili's Wired survey ran, the collapse was already well documented: Dune Analytics had measured a 97% fall from the record $17.2B of January 2022 to $466.9M by September, and CryptoSlam's daily figures showed year-end volume running at a fraction of December 2021 levels.
Against that backdrop, the piece is an argument about what sustains NFTs once speculation exits — with gaming ranked first among utility cases, positioning playable assets rather than tradable collectibles as the sector's remaining demand story.
First-order effects
- NFT projects and marketplaces that depended on trading fees face a revenue base that shrank roughly 98% over eleven months, forcing a pivot from speculation to in-game utility to retain any user activity.
- Traders who treated NFTs as crypto-adjacent positions are rotating back toward tokens, leaving gaming as the primary non-financial use case still generating engagement.
Second-order effects
- Game developers become the gatekeepers of NFT demand: studios that integrate tokenized items can capture activity that marketplaces alone no longer attract, shifting bargaining power toward whoever owns the gameplay loop.
- Marketplaces and launchpads must compete on utility integrations rather than liquidity, since pure trading volume can no longer support their fee models.
Third-order effects
- If the utility thesis holds, NFTs consolidate around applications embedded in games and services instead of standalone collectibles — but the later DappRadar data showing volume down another 81% into mid-2023 even as bitcoin recovered suggests the pivot has not yet replaced speculative demand, leaving the structural question open.
The trend: The NFT market is testing whether application-level utility like gaming can replace speculative trading as its economic base, with volume data so far arguing it cannot.