Huobi Research last week released its annual “Global Crypto Industry Overview and Trends 2022-2023” report. This report summarizes 2022 and also makes some cautious predictions for 2023. We selected the most important highlights of this report; in particular, it turns out that the NFT market was the most active and growing in 2022.
Report overview
In this new report (full report, digest), analysts from Huobi note that all investments in the crypto market exceeded $27.7 billion in 2022, while the total market capitalization of crypto assets declined by more than $2.2 trillion.
#Huobi Research 2022-2023 annual report chapter 8 has a deep dive into #GameFi & #MetaVerse which are new segments born after 2020. A large amount of funds and users have also been brought into #Web3.
Check out the full report⬇️https://t.co/ivepoDGOUo pic.twitter.com/HLE5P1DLCE
— Huobi Research (@Huobi_Research) December 16, 2022
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The authors of the study analyzed the five most popular search queries related to the Web3 industry. Queries related to NFT dominated — according to Huobi experts, this was because collectible tokens can be well integrated with a variety of industries like sports, entertainment and art. The center of NFT activity right now is Asia, where there has been the greatest demand and growth in this area. For a variety of reasons, the NFT market is recognized in the report as the most active and promising at the end of 2022.
The second most active segment, according to the report, is meta-universes and GameFi — they also grew significantly in 2022 despite the crypto winter. Investments in them have also grown: investments in these two sectors of the crypto industry increased from $874 million in 2021 to $2.4 billion in 2022 — more than 300%.
The next part of the report focuses on activity on cryptocurrency exchanges. Analysts say that the U.S. leads in CEX usage. Almost 10% of all CEX traffic comes from the USA, followed by South Korea (7.4%), Russia (6.1%), Turkey (5.6%) and Japan (3.8%).
The U.S. has also been a leader in the crypto industry — Huobi evaluated the DeFi volume share, CEX volume share, percentage of cryptocurrency users and the internet user index of the population. U.S. citizens lead in both investment and the number of active users (audience) of services and crypto wallets.
Crypto wallet use rose 6% to 85 million in 2022
A Huobi Research Institute shows that the number of crypto wallet users rose from 80 million in 2021 to 85 million by the close of 2022.#Crypto #BTChttps://t.co/iSAg5OCJ7x
— NWN (@NFT_World_News) December 19, 2022
The future of crypto
As for predictions, let’s partially list them (see the full version in the report):
- The market will reach the bottom in early 2023;
- Social tycoons in Web2, such as Twitter, will continue to pursue Web3, introducing a new paradigm of SocialFi;
- Ecological prosperity for Layer-2 will happen in 2023;
- The Dapp chain will usher in a period of rapid growth;
- On-chain regulation will be strengthened and some protocols may be endangered;
- Cryptocurrencies will be adopted as payment or authorized as fiat currency by more countries.
How can I make money on this?
The most important conclusion from the report is that the crypto market is alive and continues to receive investments despite all the horrors of crypto winter. If analysts are right, then in the second half of 2023, there will be a reversal and a new growth cycle of the crypto market will begin. That means you need to buy DIP now at the bottom of the market, there will be no other such opportunity.
It is clear from the report that not all crypto projects will survive this prolonged crisis, only the strongest will survive. So when choosing to invest in crypto at this stage with great uncertainty, you need to be very careful. It can be advised to choose projects with a long history, for example, from the Top 10 Cryptocurrencies. Obviously, the fastest-growing sectors like NFT, GameFi and meta universes — will potentially bring the biggest profits, but the risks here are also the highest.