7 January 2023: Brands, businessess, and investors have continued to enter the blockchain ecosystem at a rapid rate, despite the notoriously difficult bear market that reared its ugly head as early as May 2021. The crypto market has been met with crisis after crisis that has sent contagion shockwaves throughout the industry, causing what were once previously untouchable businesses to outright fail.

In light of the bear market, there is a growing sentiment of posivitity surrounding the new year - 2023. To best get off on the right foot, here are two key trends that every crypto user needs to be aware of for the new year:

Users Will Choose Decentralization Over Centralization

The downfall of numerous centralized crypto companies over the course of 2022 has led to investors and users alike moving away from CeFi entirely in favor of decentralized options within the ecosystem.

The largest catalyst for such a change in sentiment has come from the collapse associated with one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges in FTX. Since the original collapse and bankruptcy of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried (CEO of FTX) and Caroline Ellison (CEO of Alameda Capital) have both been hit with charges of fraud after over $8 billion in customer funds were allegedly stolen by the pair and their associates.

Since this development, leading DeFi platforms have seen large spikes in user traffic and interactions with their protocols. The following is a short list of user gains made by DeFi platforms since the FTX collapse:

• Compound: +30%
• Convex: +30%
• MakerDAO: +33%
• Curve Finance: +68%
• Aave: +70% 

The user exodus from centralized platforms to decentralized platforms can also be visualized as raw monetary value moving on-chain. For instance, Ethereum outflows from centralized exchanges to DeFi protocols increased massively following the collapse of FTX.

The chart below demonstrates the net inflows of ETH to exchanges. The line graph illustrates a significant net negative inflow of ETH since November (ETH is leaving exchanges).

Source

In addition to on-chain data supporting this trend, there is also considerable development happening to generate new payment rails to connect traditional finance institutions and customers with blockchain networks.

The most notable recent example of this is Visa. A recent proposal from Visa outlines the ambitions to create technology that would support automatic payments using Ethereum-based Layer-2 network StarkNet.

The technology would allow the creation of self custody wallets that can perform recurring payments without needing user interactions over the blockchain. Currently, this is impossible and has been a barrier to entry for wider user cases.

Investors Will Continue to Back Blockchain Gaming

Despite a treacherous investing environment since May 2021 and a confirmed bear market since November 2021, investors have continued to pour money into the blockchain gaming sector. It remains one of the fastest growing sectors of the blockchain ecosystem.

In just Q3 2022 alone, projects within the sector raised an estimated $1.3 billion. It is worth noting that this was actually a decrease from Q2 2022 but still represents a massive jump in funding compared to 2021.

Even more impressive, the blockchain gaming sector raised over $500 million between October and November 2022 alone. There is an incredible interest on the part of investors and gaming industry executives to become first movers on blockchain-based gaming, citing the potential it has over the next several years for significant growth. A major part of this value creation has been driven by considerable interest in the metaverse, stemming all the way back to Facebook’s rebrand to Meta.

Recent trends have seen major technology companies acquiring gaming studios (Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard) and top executives joining web3 companies (former COO of Activision joining Yuga Labs as CEO).

Bonus - The Metaverse is About to Become a Big Deal

The growth of the metaverse to date has been slowly building into a singificant subsector of the larger blockchain industry. Part of what LandVault, the world's largest blockchain metaverse developer, does is manually onboards brands and businesses into the metaverse via the planning, building, and publishing of metaverse experiences. Experiences are like 3D websites within the metaverse where stakeholders (i.e. consumers, creators, and brands) interact directly to engage in activities, commerce, and other actions.

The process of builiding the metaverse has been extremely slow due to the intensive, demanding resource requirements needed to develop it manually. This is a major problem that LandVault has faced. However, at the end of 2022, LandVault formerly announced a major component that will help to scale the metaverse from hundreds of experiences to millions quickly and efficiently - Matera Protocol.

Matera Protocol allows for the automated coordination of stakeholders and their respective resources that are necessary inputs into building metavers experiences. These are virtual land, labor, capital, and ideas. Matera also places this entire process on-chain in the form of tokenized metaverse experiences, enabling franctionalized ownership and creating a brand new asset class for the metaverse.

Why is this a big deal? The internet faced a similar problem in its early days, until technology caught up and made it possible to launch websites with ease. Since then, the internet scaled exponentially to over 1.7 billion websites today. The metaverse will follow the same trend.

Even more impressive - brands are already onboard with this idea, including both web3 and off-chain brands. LandVault has already added the following brands (and more) into the metaverse client pool as of Q1 2023: MasterCard, Heineken, Paypal, Google, McDonald's, Amazon, World of Women, and Uber.

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