The most promising crypto trends of 2023

The first trend in our list is Decentralized Finance (DeFi), which has gained significant traction last year. DeFi’s rapid growth continued in January 2023, which is notable when looking at the volumes of funds locked in DeFi protocols and the value of associated projects’ tokens. However, DeFi still only accounts for a few percent of the total market capitalization. Given the fact that DeFi has the potential to fundamentally change the world of modern finance, this sector will see another round of significant growth in 2023.

Our second trend is oracles. Oracle projects have existed for quite some time, but recently they’ve started attracting more attention due to the key property of oracles; linking blockchains to each other and to external information. Oracles can be used in a broad field and their development can positively impact the adoption of digital assets in everyday life.

The third trend is the Polkadot (DOT) ecosystem. Polkadot is a blockchain-based protocol designed to support multiple chains in a single network. It aims to overcome a problem in the current blockchain landscape: hundreds of projects exist in isolation and have few opportunities for interaction. Projects from the Polkadot ecosystem have every chance to replicate at least a fraction of DOT’s success, which has managed to become one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Lastly, the fourth and final trend is NFT’s, or unique digital assets. The first wave of NFT popularity took place back in 2017 when the famous CryptoKitties project hit the market. Since then, many interesting projects (and even entire virtual worlds) have emerged in the NFT sphere. In practice, unique tokens can come in handy in art, collectibles, and similar areas. Even such well-known organizations as Samsung, Formula 1, and Nike have demonstrated interest in NFT’s.

DeFi

Aave (AAVE)

Aave (AAVE) is a decentralized lending protocol that hit the market back in 2017 (ETHLend at the time of launch). The project raised about $16 million during the ICO by selling LEND tokens (the ticker which preceded the current one). The startup wasn’t that well-known before the hype around DeFi rocked 2020; the rapid rise in token’s value began after the ticker was changed to AAVE in October.

The fundamental reasons for AAVE’s growth include:

• Liquidity. AAVE is available for purchase on major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase Pro, OKEx, and others. The cryptocurrency is currently ranked 16th throughout all digital assets by market cap;
• The volume of locked funds. According to the DeFi Pulse platform, the volume of blocked funds in the decentralized protocol reaches $3.78 billion. Two months ago, this figure was below one billion. Aave is now the second-largest decentralized protocol after Maker.
• Volatility. In early 2023, Aave has already managed to show impressive growth. Only after the token swap (that is, since October 2020), the cryptocurrency has risen more than six-fold. For many investors, this is just the beginning of Aave’s global upward trend, backed by fundamental reasons for growth.

Synthetix Network Token (SNX)

The Synthetix (SNX) project was launched back in 2017 (Havven at the time of launch). In December 2018, Havven was rebranded to Synthetix and received a major development update in synthetic asset creation. As a reminder, these are collateralized tokens whose price fluctuates depending on changes in the index. That is, the user does not need to operate with the asset if that can cause him any difficulties (e.g., working with intermediaries).

The fundamental reasons for the SNX growth are:

• The team. The project was developed by blockchain enthusiast Kane Warikomi and former JPMorgan Chase employee Justin Moses.
• Liquidity. SNX is traded on almost all known crypto exchanges. In addition, the project’s ecosystem includes its own decentralized Synthetix Exchange, where synthetic assets are traded.
• Crypto Economics. SNX is used in staking, which only makes the asset more attractive to investors.

Uniswap (UNI)

Uniswap (UNI) is a decentralized exchange based on Ethereum that allows anyone to exchange their ERC20 tokens. The main difference of Uniswap from the traditional centralized exchanges is that the liquidity here is created by an automated market maker (AMM) utilizing pools, rather than by buyers and sellers, referring to the usual order book.

Uniswap attracted a lot of attention in 2020, with tons of hype created around the platform during the UNI tokens distribution. Everyone who traded and provided liquidity on the exchange before September 2020 received them. The minimum airdrop size was 400 UNI, somewhat similar to “helicopter money”, given away by the U.S. government not so long ago. At first, the UNI price soared, but by early 2022 it began to fall gradually.

This year, the token shows a number of fundamental reasons to grow:

• The volume of locked funds (Total Value Locked / TVL). According to DeFi Pulse, the volume of funds locked in UNI exceeds $3.6 billion. Meanwhile, Uniswap is the industry’s fourth-largest decentralized protocol. Given that Uniswap has been around since 2019, the protocol’s TVL has grown from a few dozen thousand dollars to several billion today. This type of growth amid the current hype around DeFi is unlikely to stop;
• Trading volume. The Uniswap trading volume reached the mark of $1 billion. For comparison, the similar indicator at Binance is orders of magnitude higher, meaning that Uniswap still has room to grow by attracting new crypto investors.

Maker (MKR)

Maker is an Ethereum-based project and one of DeFi’s flagships at the moment. “The base” of the project is MakerDAO, an organization dedicated to the development of Ethereum-based lending technology. It also initiated the issuance of the DAI stablecoin, pegged to USD, with each DAI being equal to $1. This is reached through certain economic processes within the project ecosystem.

DAIs are produced via CDP (Collateralized Debt Position) smart contracts. Essentially, CDPs allow you to spend a portion of the loan collateral in the system if the price of the pledged asset rises over time. At the same time, MKR helps control the stability of DAI; in situations where the stablecoin “holds” at the desired value, MKR is burned, which positively affects the price of the altcoin.

Let’s move on to fundamental reasons for Maker’s growth in 2023:

• The team. The project was developed by Rune Christensen, who is now the CEO of MakerDAO. At one point, the project’s development team received a $15 million investment from renowned venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz;
• The volume of locked funds (TVL). According to DeFi Pulse, Maker is currently the largest decentralized protocol with a TVL of nearly $5 billion. Given the growing popularity of decentralized loans, the Maker ecosystem will only continue to expand in 2023;
• Crypto Economics. As mentioned above, in the case of MKR burning events, the price of the token will continue to rise. In addition, investors will be attracted to Maker simply because of its position among the DeFi projects.

Ren (REN)

Ren (REN) Project is a protocol built on the RenVM virtual machine. RenVM nodes allow the tokenization of amongst different blockchains. Nodes act as a decentralized wallet that neither single party can control. This allows users of blockchains to issue Ethereum-based tokens. Users are then free to use the tokenized Bitcoin in the decentralized finance ecosystem.

RenVM nodes are powered by Secure Multiparty Computation (SMPС). SMPС technology is used for decentralized signing where no single node completely controls private keys to the wallets storing tokenized assets. Therefore, all nodes must function together to obtain consensus on transactions transmitted to the network. All large transactions are split into numerous smaller pieces and thus individual nodes process transactions without knowing the total amount or the address of the recipient of the funds. In other words, Ren is one of the best means to privately move value between blockchains.

The fundamental reasons for Ren’s growth in 2023:

• The volume of locked funds (TVL). According to DeFi Pulse, RenVM ranks 11th among all DeFi protocols ($836 million locked at the time of writing);
• Use Cases. Developers of Ethereum-based lending protocols can use RenVM to accept BTC deposits. Users are then free to borrow or lend RenBTC. The project also provides interoperability across different digital assets, making it an attractive investment vehicle;
• Crypto Economics. All RenVM nodes require a deposit and a share of 100,000 REN tokens in a smart contract that monitors nodes for misbehavior. Registered node operators are rewarded by receiving a share of tokens from issuance and burning procedures.

Terra (LUNA)

Development of the Terra (LUNA) project started back in 2018, while its mainnet launched in April 2019. Terra is a set of stablecoins tied to national currencies for use in e-commerce. Merchants who accept Terra get paid in seconds and pay a 0.6% fee over the current 7-day settlement period and a 2.8% credit card fee. Last November, Terra processed $330 million in payments.

Fundamental reasons for LUNA’s growth in 2023 are:

• Senorage. This is a special scaling system for the project. As user activity on the network increases, new LUNA tokens are automatically issued. Senorage equals the cost of issuing new tokens, subtracted from the value of the newly-minted tokens (in the case of digital assets, it is zero). In addition to the issuance of tokens, token burning events also occur in the system;
• Team. The main founders of the project are Do Kwon and Daniel Shin. The latter, incidentally, founded the e-commerce platform TMON, which generates $3.5 billion in revenue. Terra raised funds from well-known organizations such as Huobi, Polychain Capital and Hashed.
• Liquidity. LUNA is traded on a range of major exchanges, including Binance and Huobi.

There is one more thing in the Terra ecosystem that deserves attention: the Anchor, Mirror, and Chai payment solutions. Let’s start with the former. The main building block of the Anchor savings protocol is the Terra money market. The WASM smart contract on the Terra blockchain facilitates depositing and borrowing of Terra stablecoins (e.g., TerraUSD). The money market is defined by a pool of Terra deposits to which borrowers bring interest. Borrowers can use digital assets as collateral to borrow Terra from the pool. The interest rate is determined algorithmically as a function of loan supply and demand, which is coded by the pool’s utilization rate (Terra’s share of the pool that has been borrowed). Essentially, Anchor is a cryptocurrency lending protocol that uses over-collateralized loans to acquire staking positions.

Chai is a payment solution, which uses Terra’s blockchain and stablecoin economy to offer lower transaction fees and fund the ongoing discounts. Finally, Mirror is the first synthetic asset protocol that tracks the price of stocks, futures, exchange-traded funds and other traditional financial assets, linking cryptocurrency to traditional markets.

The Graph (GRT)

The Graph is a decentralized open-source protocol for indexing blockchain data. Developers can create and publish different APIs (subgraphs) and make queries via GraphQL. The platform can be used to quickly search for any data on, e.g., Ethereum blockchain using simple queries. This solves a common problem that many blockchain indexing platforms encounter.

Here are a few fundamental reasons for the growth of GRT in 2023:

• Key use cases. The Graph simplifies blockchain interaction, with the project already having a product broadly accepted by the community. In other words, The Graph will continue to attract investors given the projected bullish dynamics of the crypto market in 2023;
• Future developments. Now that the project’s core network is up and running, The Graph will continue to evolve. The development team previously announced that The Graph Foundation would build a production-ready Graph Explorer and Gateway;
• Liquidity. GRT tokens are available on major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase Pro.

Recently, the Graph Foundation revealed a list of additional Tier 1 blockchains that are being evaluated for potential integration. These could join The Graph’s currently supported Ethereum and IPFS blockchains, allowing data to be queried from subgraphs across numerous blockchains. The Graph is already integrated with a range of Ethereum applications, such as Uniswap, AAVE, Decentraland and Synthetix, which use subgraphs to extract data. Graph Network smart contracts are also deployed on Ethereum.

Polkadot Ecosystem

Acala Network (ACA)

The importance of cross-chain interaction for blockchains is similar to that of the Internet for the ongoing exchange of information in the real world. Polkadot extends the capabilities of the public, consortium, and private blockchain networks providing interoperability and economic scalability of transactions. Acala (ACA) is the first decentralized financial consortium of its kind, providing a set of protocols to further develop the ecosystem.

The Acala Network has two protocols: Honzon, aimed at creating a universal multi currency-backed stablecoin, and Homa, designed to alleviate the opportunity cost of using stakeable assets outside of classical staking. Ecosystem’s stablecoin aUSD is backed by the dollar at a 1:1 ratio by collateralizing not only DOT tokens, but also other coins (Bitcoin and Etherium).

Fundamental reasons for ACA’s growth in 2023 include:

• Polkadot’s success. This reason makes almost any project in the Polkadot ecosystem attractive to investors: In just a couple of years, DOT has managed to break into the top 10 digital assets by capitalization;
• Universal Stablecoin. The idea of a universal stablecoin, which could essentially become Polkadot’s “financial center,” is a promising reason to invest;
• Growth potential. ACA tokens have not yet been added to major cryptocurrency exchanges. Alleged listings are already promising huge profits for the early investors in the project during its launch phase.

Moonbeam (GLMR)

Moonbeam is a developer-oriented blockchain that aims to provide compatibility with the existing Ethereum toolkit and network. It provides a complete EVM implementation, a Web3-compatible API, and bridges that connect Moonbeam to existing Ethereum networks. This allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp interfaces for Moonbeam with minimal changes.

Moonbeam will also parachute into the Polkadot network. This means that it will get Polkadot’s relay chain security and will be able to integrate with other circuits connected to Polkadot (once this feature becomes available on Polkadot).

Overall, Moonbeam makes creating applications on the Polkadot blockchain much easier than implementing a full parachain or paratrade. Specifically:

• Substrate technology is powerful but complex. With a Moonbeam-based application, you don’t have to worry about economic token models, release schedules, governance, or security – all of which are vital when running your own blockchain;
• You can use Moonbeam’s full connection to the Polkadot relay chain, which Moonbeam’s economic model pays for on an ongoing basis. This is much cheaper than paying for parachain- or paratrade-based access;
• A smooth upgrade path from Moonbeam smart contract/DApp to full parachain or paratrade.

The Moonbeam network includes a Glimmer token (GLMR). The coin is still in development, so we recommend keeping a close eye on the startup’s official resources for news and updates.

Fundamental reasons for Moonbeam’s growth in 2023:

• The rapid launch of the main network. According to the project’s developers, the mainnet launch should occur in the second quarter of 2023. GLMR tokens should enter circulation at the same time;
• Major investors. Moonbeam has so far held only one round of funding, in which Hong Kong investment fund Hashkey Capital and KR1 PLC fund participated.

Plasm Network (PLM)

Plasm Network is a scalable DApps platform based on Substrate. It is compatible with Polkadot, and in January 2022, the Plasm parachain was launched on the Rococo V1 testnet within the platform ecosystem. Note that this is the first news about the launch of Plasm parachain inside Polkadot, which bodes well for the project’s future growth.

Overall, the market had been favorable towards Plasm in 2020. Plasm Network has not been left out of the industry’s bullish trend. According to the official blog post, the platform held several lockdrops (distribution of tokens for first user activity). On top of that, Plasm accumulated more than 16,000 ETH on the project’s smart contract in just two months. The startup has also received several grants to develop its ZK and Optimistic Rollups. In addition, the network has huge plans for 2022, with Polkadot parachain at the top of the list. It will also contribute to its goal of creating a dApp hub in the Polkadot network. Becoming the first parachain on the Rococo V1 test network is the first step toward its goal of becoming a Polkadot parachain.

The Plasm ecosystem uses the PLM token, whose tokenomics could be one of the reasons for its surge in value in 2023:

• Staking. Plasma Network will be powered by the Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) consensus algorithm. PLM will participate in staking, the reward for block formation will be shared between validators and nominators (roles in the Polkadot ecosystem);
• Transaction revenue and DApps. Network members will receive profits for securing the network in the form of PLM transfer fees. In addition, there is a reward mechanism in PLM for DApps creators. Developers of DApps must have PLM to get slots for DApps on the Plasm Network main parachain. In other words, the growing popularity of Plasma Network among developers will have a positive impact on PLM price;
• Token delegation. Any user of the system can delegate tokens to the operator (one of the roles in the project ecosystem) in the placement procedure and receive part of the reward.

HydraDX (HDX)

HydraDX is a cross-chain liquidity protocol built on Substrate. As a reminder, Substrate is a modular blockchain framework used in many other blockchains (Kusama, Polkadot, Edgeware, etc.) and supported by an extensive community of developers. HydraDX’s high scalability, predictable commissions, ability to implement front-end resistance. Substrate technology makes many of these advantages possible. HydraDX should become the basis for the fast and decentralized exchange of digital assets. The success of Uniswap, SushiSwap and 1inch in this area alone shows how interesting the solutions promoted by the HydraDX team are to investors right now.

HydraDX uses the native HDX token. It is designed to increase security and align incentives for key network participants. The total HDX supply is a function of the liquidity provided. The list of tasks and the high probability of their completion by the HydraDX team makes the project one of the most promising investments of 2023. That’s why you should start following the startup’s news closely:

• Creating multi-asset liquidity pools. HydraDX’s unique solution allows you to put multiple assets into one liquidity pool;
• Interaction. HydraDX is designed to work with other networks. Ethereum-based assets will eventually be liquid on HydraDX;
• Native liquidity for the Polkadot ecosystem. HydraDX is a native solution for exchanging all Substrate-based assets in the fast-growing Polkadot ecosystem.

Laminar

The Laminar team is building an open financial platform using synthetic assets and margin trading. The platform is being built on Ethereum using DeFi building blocks. The team is also starting to launch Flowchain using Substrate to scale to a high-performance trading network. As a partner in the Polkadot ecosystem, Flowchain will contribute and leverage this interoperable and scalable blockchain ecosystem network.

Reasons to follow Laminar in 2023:

• Major investment. Even in the early stages of the launch, the Laminar team received funding from the web3 foundation, which also sponsored Polkadot and Kusama;
• Decentralized margin trading. Laminar will make leveraged trading possible on a decentralized basis and using synthetic digital assets.

The project’s tokens are not yet in circulation, but the subsequent listing on exchanges will open up additional prospects for price growth.

Oracles

Chainlink (LINK)

Chainlink (LINK) is a decentralized network of oracles that focus on providing real-time data to smart contracts on the blockchain. Although the concept of oracles that allow blockchains to access the outside world data existed before the project emerged in 2017, Chainlink introduced its practical application on a decentralized basis.

Fundamental reasons for the growth of LINK in 2023:

• Team. Chainlink co-founder and CEO Sergey Nazarov is one of the pioneers in the field of smart contracts. He was once involved in the NXT development (a pre-Ethereum smart contract platform). He also owned smartcontracts.com before Ethereum was launched. Back then most people didn’t even know what smart contracts were;
• Adoption. Oracles are designed to create bridges between blockchains and the “real world.” The more widespread this technology becomes, the more likely LINK will grow rapidly in the future;
• DeFi development. Chainlink is the largest by capitalization and the most popular oracle for decentralized finance protocols. As it is currently experiencing rapid growth, it will also have a positive effect on the price of LINK in the future.

The list of Chainlink’s use cases is so vast that it deserves a separate article. We’ll remind you of the most significant project’s features:

• DeFi. Chainlink oracles play a crucial role in creating advanced smart contracts representing financial products and monetary instruments, especially those including market data such as exchange rates, interest rates, asset prices, indices and more;
• Stablecoins. DeFiDollar is an example of a decentralized meta-stablecoin (a stablecoin backed by multiple stablecoins) that uses Chainlink price flows to track the price of underlying assets, including sUSD, USDT, DAI and USDC. Should one or more of these tokens deviate from their 1: 1 peg to the USD, causing DUSD to lose its peg as well, a rebalancing is triggered between the four reserves to preserve dollar parity;
• Futures. dYdX and MCDEX are examples of onchain financial applications that use Chainlink price streams to provide perpetual contracts, which are futures contracts with no expiration date. Utilizing Chainlink oracles, these protocols can ensure the solvency of their platform by having access to real-time price data to determine when liquidation should occur and dynamically set the funding rate to maintain a net neutral exposure;
• Bonds. Bonds are a financial arrangement that increases short-term capital by issuing debt that is due later. Traditional bond contracts can be replicated as automated smart contracts using Chainlink oracles, which provide the data required for calculations, such as interest rates, debt estimates, fiat payments, and so on.

Band Protocol (BAND)

Band Protocol (BAND), similar to other oracles, connects blockchain to off-chain data. Specifically, Band Protocol can provide data for blockchain queries. The project is aiming to become the data infrastructure layer for Web 3.0 applications, providing decentralized off-network data to various smart contracts via oracles driven by its dPoS consensus mechanism.

Fundamental reasons for BAND’s growth in 2023 include:

• Liquidity. BAND’s listing on Coinbase alone may serve as proof of the project’s success;
• Use Cases. The BAND token is used as collateral to issue tokens whose price and supply are algorithmically determined through a continuous token bonding curve. In addition, BAND is used by the holders to vote on future network development paths;
• Flexibility. Some oracles are tied only to Ethereum, which makes sense since it is the driving force behind most decentralized applications. However, Band Protocol also works with multiple other blockchains.

Band Protocol is probably Chainlink’s biggest competitor. Since there are virtually no alternatives to decentralized oracles, the two projects are currently among the most important in this niche. Nevertheless, there are some differences between the two protocols. LINK is not a purely decentralized service because users have to follow the company’s decisions, as the speed of LINK is also highly dependent on them.

The situation is different with Band Protocol: this is an open, decentralized Oracle protocol, where decision-making authority is delegated to users. Nevertheless, Chainlink occupied a niche in the industry much earlier and has already been able to establish large and important partnerships. However, LINK already has a market capitalization dozens of times larger than that of BAND. Whether Band Protocol will reach the size of Chainlink remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the cryptocurrency industry is very young and this promises Band Protocol additional incentives for growth.

Tellor (TRB)

Tellor (TRB) is an Ethereum-based oracle for decentralized DeFi applications. With Tellor, smart contracts inside dApps can interact with the “outside” data. Tellor has a native TRB token designed to reward stakers, who actually keep the oracle network running and secure. Stakers compete against each other to include information from smart contracts in the database. TRB tokens can be mined and staked (the minimum entry threshold is 1,000 TRB).

Fundamental reasons for TRB’s growth in 2023 are:

• Volatility. TRB’s volatility peaked in mid-summer last year during the first wave of hype around DeFi. TRB managed to grow more than 12 times in a short period of time to later return to the previous support levels. It’s highly likely that with the next influx of new investors into the DeFi sector, TRB will repeat something similar this year;
• Partnerships. Tellor has a history of concluded partnerships with Binance Labs, ConsenSys, and MakerDAO;
• Team. The co-founder and CEO of the project is Brenda Loya, an Ethereum developer, and former U.S. government employee.

A few more words about the TRB token use cases:

TRB is used to request certain data updates, and when a miner sends data to the blockchain, they are paid with TRB as a reward;

All miners must deposit TRB into a Tellor smart contract before they can compete and start mining. These incentives make it so that if a miner tries to send an incorrect piece of data, the system can dispute its value and then discard it as malicious. To initiate a value dispute, the dispatcher must pay a TRB fee. All disputes are voted on by the Tellor community.

In this way, Tellor provides a decentralized alternative to Chainlink, the largest project in this area. Similar to Band Protocol, this altcoin has every chance to occupy a significant niche among other oracles.

NFT

Decentraland (MANA)

Decentraland (MANA) is an entire virtual world where players can interact, create, exchange, and monetize virtual objects in the form of NFT tokens. With MANA tokens, players can buy plots of virtual land in Decentraland with the prospect of reselling them later. This so-called metaworld is not a new trend but has every chance of gaining popularity in 2023.

There are two main assets in the Decentraland ecosystem – LAND (virtual land plots) and MANA (platform token). The latter is traded on major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance and Coinbase Pro.

Fundamental reasons for MANA’s growth are:

• The team. Esteban Ordano is among the founders of the project. Esteban is a former software engineer at cryptocurrency company BitPay, who was involved in the creation of such projects as Copay and Streamium. Please note that Decentraland as an idea was formed with Ordano’s participation back in 2016, and since then, the development team has been quite successful in developing and implementing new ideas;
• Liquidity. As noted above, MANA is traded on the largest cryptocurrency exchanges with relatively high volumes;
• Crypto Economics. The maximum number of MANA coins in circulation is set at 2.19 billion; at the time of writing, MANA’s circulating supply is 1.32 billion. In this situation, the growth in MANA demand will be dictated by the growing popularity of LANDs within the virtual world. LANDs are necessary to create content that can be sold for MANA. Given the recent rise in popularity of non-fungible tokens, a rise in MANA’s price in 2023 is very likely.

Terra Virtua Kolect (TVK)

Thanks to the convergence of blockchain, virtual reality, augmented reality, digital collectibles, and decentralized finance, we are now being offered more ways to escape the real world than ever before. Nowadays, books like Snow Crash and Ready Player One are often seen as predictions rather than as science fiction novels.

Terra Virtua (TVK) combines all of these exciting technologies into one big immersive marketplace and ecosystem, and its platform allows users to buy, sell and store digital collectibles in a virtual environment.

Fundamental reasons for TVK’s growth in 2023:

• Real rewards. Users have the opportunity to earn real rewards by buying items in the ecosystem with TVK tokens;
• Marketplace. The project ecosystem has a platform for selling unique collectibles, which could potentially attract new investors and increase the fundamental value of the project.

Enjin Coin (ENJ)

Enjin Coin (ENJ) is a cryptocurrency for virtual goods created by the Enjin startup. Enjin is “the largest online gaming community platform,” with over 250,000 gaming communities and 18.7 million registered players. The Enjin team is developing a coin focused on gaming to make it the most usable cryptocurrency in the cybersport industry. The project includes Enjin Coin as well as a software development kit (SDK) that developers can integrate into their games and communities. The use of blockchain in games helps reduce the high fees and fraud that are common in the transfer of virtual goods.

Fundamental reasons for ENJ’s growth in 2023 are:

• The team. Enjin, the company behind Enjin Coin, is the largest online gaming community platform. The project’s advisors are Anthony Diorio (co-founder of Ethereum) and Pat Labin (previous producer and CTO of the famous Bioware game studio). Enjin has also partnered with Unity, PC Gamer, and NRG eSports.
• Development of eSports. The virtual entertainment industry has experienced explosive growth over the past few years, comparable to the growth of the digital asset industry. Blockchain integration with cybersports could potentially attract new investors to ENJ.

Reality Cards

Reality Cards is a prediction marketplace that allows you to “own” (effectively rent out) the results of an event. These results are represented by unique hashes using NFT and the Ethereum blockchain. Instead of betting on the outcome of an event. You can own NFT tokens (cards) that represent the outcome. Reality Cards is the first prediction marketplace that uses NFT technology, which will make it unique compared to any other prediction marketplace available so far. The project is still in beta testing.

Fundamental reasons for Reality Cards’ growth in 2023:

• Uniqueness. Reality Cards combines the concepts of prediction markets and NFT, some of the most popular trends in the cryptocurrency industry;
• A rich roadmap. Reality Cards is scheduled to integrate with another popular protocol, The Graph, in February 2022. In addition, the development team will introduce the ability for users to create their own events;
• Token release. Reality Cards will launch its own token in mid-2022, so it makes sense to keep an eye on the project.

Conclusion: Cryptocurrencies of 2023 - A Glimpse into the Future of Digital Assets

As 2023 continues to unfold, the dynamic world of cryptocurrencies has clearly signaled its lasting influence and transformative impact on the global financial arena. The article presented a detailed exploration of the notable crypto trends for the year, emphasizing the projects that are shaping the next wave of digital financial revolution.

One of the most transformative trends to emerge has been Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Not only has DeFi garnered substantial attention due to its potential to reshape modern finance, but it has also highlighted several promising projects. From Aave's decentralized lending protocols to the vast locked fund volumes in Maker, DeFi has clearly delineated its position as a force to be reckoned with. The impressive growth trajectories of these protocols underscore their capacity to drive systemic change, reinforcing the idea that decentralized financial systems can offer viable alternatives to traditional banking structures.

In tandem with DeFi, the rise of oracles cannot be understated. These entities act as conduits, linking various blockchains and external information sources, creating a seamless web of interconnected data. Their growing importance is a testament to the evolving nature of the digital asset industry, emphasizing the need for reliable, real-time information flow across diverse platforms.

Another significant trend dominating discussions is the Polkadot (DOT) ecosystem. In an age where countless blockchain projects operate in silos, Polkadot emerges as the bridge fostering interconnectivity. Its success has sparked a renewed interest in similar protocols that facilitate seamless interaction between various blockchain projects.

Yet, amid these technological marvels, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) have carved a unique niche for themselves, blurring the lines between digital assets and art. These tokens, representing a significant leap from the days of CryptoKitties, have caught the attention of global giants like Samsung, Formula 1, and Nike. This suggests that the application of blockchain isn't limited to just financial mechanisms but also extends to cultural and artistic expressions.

Considering specific projects, Aave, with its rich history from ETHLend to its current status, showcases the evolving nature of DeFi projects. Synthetix further illustrates the potential of synthetic assets in the decentralized space. Meanwhile, Uniswap redefines decentralized exchanges, proving that automated market-making can be just as effective, if not more so, than traditional methods. And, not to forget, Maker's emphasis on stability with the DAI stablecoin offers a glimpse into how decentralized finance can offer reliability in volatile times. Finally, Ren exemplifies the drive for privacy and inter-blockchain operability in the crypto world.

In wrapping up, it's clear that 2023 is poised to be a year of both consolidation and innovation for the crypto industry. While established trends like DeFi are expected to solidify their presence, emerging concepts like NFTs and interconnected blockchains hint at the exciting possibilities on the horizon. As we traverse this year, it's essential to keep a close watch on these projects and trends, for they hold the key to the future trajectory of digital assets and their role in the broader financial landscape.