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
Joel Khalili / Wired :
Context & Ripple Effects
By late December 2022, the NFT market had spent most of the year deflating: Dune Analytics had already measured a 97% collapse from the record $17.2B of January to $466.9M by September, and CryptoSlam's daily figures showed year-end volume running at a fraction of December 2021's pace. Wired's piece, reported by Joel Khalili after three months inside a16z's accelerator program, asks what survives when speculation drains out — and lands on gaming as the leading utility case.
The timing matters because the answer is being written against a falling tape: the same week Wired published, daily NFT volume had halved within five days per CryptoSlam, making the search for non-trading use cases less a thesis than a survival strategy for projects built during the 2021-22 boom.
First-order effects
- Traders and collectors who supplied the $17B January peak now face a ~$400M November market, so projects that monetized primarily through trading fees and secondary royalties lose their revenue base almost entirely.
Second-order effects
- With trading revenue gone, NFT projects and the startups emerging from accelerators like a16z's program are pushed toward embedded use cases — gaming items, access, in-app assets — where value comes from usage rather than resale; data trackers such as Dune Analytics, DappRadar, and CryptoSlam become the de facto scoreboard for which pivot is working.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the NFT industry structurally consolidates around utility-bearing assets inside games and apps, while pure collectible trading becomes a residual, much smaller market — a shift later data points confirmed, with DappRadar showing volume down another 81% into mid-2023 even as traders rotated back toward cryptocurrencies.
The trend: NFTs are repricing from a speculative trading asset into a utility layer for games and apps, with each volume milestone from Dune, CryptoSlam, and DappRadar marking how far that transition has run.