23 Blockchain Predictions for 2023

Since 2016 I have ended each year with predictions for the blockchain ecosystem for the year ahead. 2022 has been one of the most tumultuous years in crypto, with a litany of decentralized and centralized entities already evaporated or on their last leg. It feels like we are in the final convulsions of a nascent ecosystem, expelling bad actors and bad practices in a dramatic but ultimately maturing process. Here’s what we’ll see on the other side.

Andrew Keys is a venture capitalist and managing partner of DARMA Capital, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission-registered commodity pool operator and commodity trading adviser focused on quantitative systematic alpha of Web3 protocols. Prior to DARMA Capital, he was global head of business development for ConsenSys.

When we look back at 2022 in 10 years, the real news wasn’t the idiocy of Sam Bankman-Fried and Celsius Network; it was that Ethereum shipped proof-of-stake and continues to be the most ubiquitous layer 1. A series of protocol-level developments has created a vortex of innovation, development, users and capital. In Ethereum we are witnessing the evolution of the substrate of humanity’s social, economic and political operating system.

In 2023, Ethereum will continue to be the most widely adopted, widely developed and capital-heavy layer 1 blockchain. The Merge was the greatest event in the industry since Satoshi’s Bitcoin Genesis Block in 2009. More nuanced but equally important developments will launch on Ethereum in 2023, driving greater adoption and capital in a flywheel effect that will situate Ethereum as the leader in the next bull run.

The next Ethereum upgrade after the Merge is Shanghai, planned for the second quarter of 2023. Among many upgrades Shanghai will enable withdrawals of ether (ETH) stakes, which have been locked in the deposit contract since staking was enabled in December 2020. The ability to un-stake ETH could increase the amount of staked ETH as stakers, who were uneasy with the idea of locking funds, come on board.

Following the Shanghai upgrade, EIP-4844 is another Ethereum innovation that will further situate Ethereum as the most ubiquitous layer 1. EIP-4844 will enable proto-danksharding. Proto-danksharding is proposed as a step along the way to full sharding, and will help layer 2s scale. Danksharding is a sharding design that uses a “merged market fee” in which each shard has different blocks, but shares one block proposer.

Read more: What Is Sharding?

EIP-4844 is a proposal to start implementing elements of danksharding as the full danksharding design is still being developed. Though no longer in the Shanghai update, I predict proto-danksharding will be accepted and implemented in 2023, setting the stage for rapid development towards full sharding and maximum Ethereum scalability.

After a smooth transition to proof-of-stake, Ethereum’s utility as a platform for staking innovation will continue to expand, creating a new compounding crypto yield curve.

Following Ethereum’s successful migration to proof-of-stake in September, ETH is now the largest staked capital base of any blockchain, with more than $20 billion staked. Prior to the Merge, we saw innovation in the realm of staking through projects like Lido, which enables liquid staking, and Obol, which provides distributed validator technology.

In 2023, we will see continued innovation in ETH staking as capital seeks more secure forms of yield and future updates enable stake withdrawals. EigenLayer is a particularly innovative staking project. EigenLayer provides crypto-economic “security as a service” to rollups, bridges and oracles. EigenLayer allows these projects to leverage Ethereum’s staked security to supplement or complement the security provided by a native token. In 2023, EigenLayer plans to launch its re-staking protocol and the first middleware using the re-staking mechanism, called EigenDA (Data Availability).

An increase in ETH staking in 2023 will engender demand for more nuanced utility from validators, stakers, and projects built on Ethereum. Staking innovations like EigenLayer and others will continue funneling utility and capital into the Ethereum base layer, creating a flywheel of adoption and utility that will continue to establish Ethereum as the global settlement layer for Web3.

The Fed will turn dovish, setting the stage for the next crypto bull market in Q3 2023.

I predict the U.S. Federal Reserve will pivot away from its hawkish policy and stop raising interest rates by the second quarter of 2023. As we see credit card debt at notable highs and savings at notable lows, I anticipate we will see macroeconomic indicators like Brent crude oil fall to $60 – early 2021 levels – and shipping container rates fall below $2,000, which hasn’t happened since before COVID-19. Both of these signals indicate an economy in need of jump-starting, which will convince the Fed to ease off the interest rate hikes. This will engender a risk-on environment, incentivizing capital flows into more innovative industries like crypto. By this time, I also predict sufficient regulatory progress will be made in the crypto industry, meaning that the risk-on environment will be accompanied by clearer policies. Altogether, this will engender the next bull run beginning in Q3 2023.

Washington, D.C., will be a crypto hotspot in 2023 as regulatory innovation proceeds at unprecedented rates.

The centralized finance disasters of 2022 were the result of poor risk management, insufficient governance, incomplete audits, and potential fraud – all of which could have happened in any industry. Consumer protection will be top of mind for policymakers in 2023. The majority of emerging policy will be around centralized exchanges and stablecoins. Exchanges like Coinbase may be forced to be G-SIFI-regulated institutions, which will increase their regulatory compliance costs. Washington, D.C., will be the hotbed of some of the most controversial and important conversations about crypto in 2023.

During this increase in regulatory attention, the Securities and Exchange Commission will continue to declare that all tokens are unregistered securities, which is categorically untrue. Just because this new database technology is able to digitize and tokenize any asset doesn’t mean all such assets are securities. We will see tokens representing everything: an electron on a microgrid, a bar of gold, a carbon offset credit, a software license, a governance right, a concert ticket, a doctor’s prescription, a meme that got very popular in 2010 and then everyone forgot, a fiat currency, and a reward point – none of which should rationally be lumped under securities. That isn’t consumer protection, [SEC chief] Gary Gensler, it’s willful ignorance of new technologies.

If the U.S. rushes through poorly designed legislation under the guise of consumer protection, we will lose Web3 to the rest of the world – unlike how the U.S. won the Web2 revolution. A regulatory ontology should be defined to help everyone in the space determine whether a specific token should be classified as a commodity, security, or other type of asset.

Banks chartered by the Federal Reserve will offer crypto services.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council aims to further evolve regulations to protect consumers and enable greater technology innovation in an effort to build more robust and secure global platforms.

An example of this is VaultLink, whose Digital Value Transfer Rail enables banks to offer crypto-asset services (custody, staking, exchange), digital value transfers and real-time payments in a regulatory-compliant manner with true supervisory oversight. VaultLink’s 2023 plans are to continue serving as a leading voice on the Federal Reserve’s Working Group while collaborating with the banking agencies to enable crypto services.

NFT utility will grow more nuanced, personalized and commercial as we collectively move past the “jpeg” era. At the same time, blue chip “jpeg” NFTs will be a multi-billion-dollar asset class.

In 2023, the Web3 ecosystem will move past the “jpeg” era of non-fungible tokens that dominated the last two years, represented by 10,000 pfp projects and zero-utility art. The term “NFT” will no longer automatically mean “digital art” as it has, since a variety of use cases will emerge, all using NFTs as the base technology.

Already commercial behemoths like Starbucks are exploring alternative use cases of NFTs. Many more commercial leaders are watching how Starbucks will unfold; if successful, we will see a big bang of major brands releasing NFT rewards points. Web3-native projects such as Mojito have started this evolution, and are already powering both brands and creators that want to explore more personalized utility of NFTs. 2023 will also be the rise of “phygital” where a teenager who purchases a physical pair of Nikes will also have a digital receipt of those sneakers to be digitally worn on their avatar in the metaverse.

This rapid evolution in the true utility of NFTs will force the crypto community to look back critically on the projects of 2021 and 2022. If they haven’t failed already, the vast majority of remaining NFT projects that haven’t evolved utility will join the NFT graveyard. What we’ll find remaining will be the blue chip NFTs that have been acknowledged but largely ignored in the last year – the CryptoPunks of the world.

Investment DAOs will grow in prominence as decentralized, secure and transparent alternatives to investing through GP/LP venture structures.

Investment decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) will grow in number and in prominence as transparent, auditable, and collaborative vehicles to deploy and allocate capital. Investment DAOs will force a shift in the mindset of financial decision making; instead of relying on the opinions of a few experts, these DAOs will operate based on the consensus of their global memberships via a “wisdom of the curated crowd.” As agile, on-chain entities, these investment DAOs will be some of the earliest players in high-potential investment opportunities, leveling the playing field for the average investor.

Tribute Labs is an investment DAO building machine whose current network consists of 16 investment DAOs ranging across the Web3 landscape with assets under management of over $1 billion. These DAOs have set frameworks that will serve as blueprints for the emerging set of investments DAOs in 2023. Each DAO is limited to 99 members, striking a balance between a diversity of members and the relative ability to make quick decisions and allocate capital efficiently. Tribute Labs will introduce more DAOs in 2023 (AI, DeSci, Urbit and more), continuing to establish best practices and grow the impact of investment DAOs.

Read more: 2023 Will Be the Year of Dapps – Here's What to Expect

Filecoin becomes a fully fledged layer 1 protocol in its own right, paving the way for the world’s largest decentralized data economy.

In 2020, I predicted that IPFS and Filecoin would step into the global spotlight as a viable decentralized solution for data storage. Two years on, the Filecoin network has indeed expanded at breakneck pace, amassing an incredible amount of hardware to the network. It is now the largest decentralized storage network on Earth. More than 4,000 storage providers contribute ~16 exbibyte (EIB) of storage capacity. Client data stored on the network is up 15 times, year to date. That’s enough to store the entire Internet Archive 275 times over. That said, to be competitive with the centralized cloud, Filecoin will need to grow more than 10 times from here – still a long way to go, but a credible path.

The vision for Filecoin has always been larger than storage. The project’s community has a steadfast commitment to the mammoth ambition of building the decentralized infrastructure required to enable programmable storage (via smart contracts), retrieval and large scale computation of data. In other words, Filecoin is enabling open services for data.

The protocol is releasing smart contracts in Q1 2023 through the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), a critical on-chain upgrade which will allow it to come into its own as a fully fledged layer 1 protocol. The FVM will enhance the sophistication of Filecoin’s storage services while unlocking a whole new universe of use cases for the Web3 space. To date, other layer 1 smart contracts have focused on a few use cases: decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, gaming and so on. What makes smart contracts on Filecoin unique is the ability to pair these Web3 offerings with real world services like storage and compute, provided by an open market. I expect the Web3 space to eagerly anticipate the “coming of age” of Filecoin and explore building natively on the protocol next year.

Reputation will re-emerge as a fundamental innovation in Web3 as a multitude of reputation projects launch.

In 2023, years of progress on the decentralized identity and reputation front will finally come to a head. These systems will start to become critical pieces of infrastructure underpinning most of our interactions and transactions, especially in Web3. Soon you will be able to take your flawless reputation built on one application and apply it towards another. Decentralized identity and reputation systems make this possible by taking a more holistic approach to identity through platform-agnostic, user-centric data aggregation.

Projects like Intuition are pushing the boundaries on the identity front – by incentivizing the attestation of interesting data points and incorporating these attestations into the “identity” derivation processes, Intuition is able to provide a more comprehensive view of “who” and “what” things are. This is essential in enabling humans to coordinate on a decentralized global scale.

Prepare for the rise of “ZK everything” as privacy technology emerges from academic proofs-of-concept to usable, scalable technology.

Zero-knowledge proofs rose to prominence in the past year, with one use case, ZK-Rollups, gaining visibility as the dominant tool for Ethereum scaling. In 2023, a much broader set of use cases will be unlocked by adoption of software development kits (SDK) that allow ZK smart contracts to be programmed into applications (“ZKApps”), executed off-chain, with verification and settlement back on-chain. Off-chain execution opens up a whole new world for data privacy and attestation, and efficiency. It will start to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3, and will enable new identity use cases, social networking, voting, games and zkML.

The lynchpin to the success of ZK in 2023 is access to existing Web3 devs. O(1) Labs – company behind the first succinct ZK-based layer 1 MINA – launched an SDK that will better enable the development of in-browser ZKApps in the year to come. These sorts of developments from 2022 will mean that in 2023 ZK will move from the world of academia and testnets into daily Web3 life. Moreover, teams like Matter Labs will roll out zkSync2.0 which is a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine that supports Solidity, Vyper and account abstraction.

The zero-knowledge proving market will be larger than bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) market by 2030.

Cosmos gets interesting as developers and users seek more customization. Appchains will also go live on Ethereum.

In 2023, the “Cosmos vision” will finally find mass adoption. Cosmos is not a blockchain but a ‘“galaxy” of interconnected chains. Importantly, all of the chains employ the inter-blockchain communication (IBC) standard, a technology designed to mimic the early innovations of TCP/IP layer in Web2. For nefarious hackers, bridges have represented the most lucrative attack vector, totaling a whopping US$2.5 billion since 2020. Having a standard communication layer just makes sense.

Moreover, as blockchains have matured in application, developers will be forced to welcome and own more of the blockchain stack. We will see a range of customizations. How much security does your chain want or need? Is it open for all developers? How about fees? Where do you want to be connected? The many chains approach makes these customizations possible and may unlock true product market fit.

Appchains give developers the ability to customize execution environments in a way that smart contract platforms can’t support. The challenge is that appchains lose the shared security enjoyed by dapps. App-specific rollups (RollApps) get the best of both worlds and will be a big trend in 2023.

Alongside the growth in Cosmos, however, we will see the rise of app-specific chains anchored by Ethereum. As the largest project in the blockchain ecosystem, Ethereum is able to take the best in open-source, and port it to the Ethereum community.

Projects like Stackr Network are pioneering this wave of appchains through RollApps. Stackr offers a language-agnostic SDK for developers to customize optimistic rollups along with a decentralized sequencer network to run them in a trust-minimized way. The plan in 2023 is to build a developer alpha and onboard early projects. These projects will also help shape the design of the system through a closed feedback cycle.

Bitcoin will face headwinds, continue to lose market share and will not lead the next bull market.

Bitcoin will continue falling behind in the market as it succumbs to prevailing headwinds: primarily “pet rock” syndrome, environmental concerns and failure as “digital gold.”

Bitcoin’s lack of daily utility will begin working against its favor as the rest of Web3 starts demonstrating real-world use cases. It will succumb to the “pet rock” syndrome, in which holding the asset won’t seem as attractive compared to directing capital to tokens and ecosystems with increasing commercial and enterprise use.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns will only rise with the macro-political and macro-environmental movement. Enterprises, individuals and governments will be under continued pressure to curb unnecessary energy consumption, and crypto is already under scrutiny. Environmental concerns are only one reason why Web3 prefers proof-of-stake, but it is a coincidence that will make PoS blockchains more resilient against ESG criticisms and regulation. Any remaining PoW chains must demonstrate clear utility to validate continued energy consumption. Bitcoin won’t transition to PoS and its utility will remain limited, setting it up to be the primary recipient of such criticism.

Lastly, bitcoin had every chance to act as a risk-off digital gold-like hedge but failed to live up to that opportunity over several years. It acted like risk-on tech beta instead.

Together, these three headwinds will put Bitcoin back even further in this bear market, setting the stage for another layer 1 with actual utility to lead the next bull run.

Web3 gaming will move past its flawed, early projects and finally begin meeting gamers where they are.

Web3 gaming has, for the most part, fallen short of its vision so far. The most “successful” Web3 games – for instance, Axie Infinity and DeFi Kingdoms – have been propped up as the future of gaming, but have failed to make an impression among the 3 billion gamers worldwide. In fact, Web3 gaming has received a bad reputation, characterized as little more than a money grab or DeFi with a veneer. This reputation has not been improved because Web3 gaming projects are highly connected to crypto markets.

In 2023, Web3 gaming will shake off the habits of these earliest projects and start releasing projects that bring together the utility of Web3 and the aesthetics of traditional gaming. The next wave of Web3 games will look nothing like the Axie-style games of the last two years, and will begin resembling mainstream gaming aesthetics. Popular attention will shift away from token-first projects like Axie towards the studios, companies, and titles that have been building with a gameplay-first approach: Horizon, Animoca and others.

As layer 1 protocols continue to undergo core developments in scalability and privacy, layer 2s will support the next wave of consumer-friendly applications.

Despite breakneck innovation, the leading layer 1s still have sufficient protocol-layer development to undergo in order to support daily mass adoption of Web3 applications. Specifically, consumer requirements like scale, user experience (UX), confidentiality and security. The layer 2 ecosystem has been growing steadily over the past 18 months, with generalized networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism, and industry-specific networks including ImmutableX. The layer 2 ecosystem has had a couple of false starts but in 2023 we will see layer 2s come to the forefront of crypto adoption as they handle the wave of consumer applications coming to market. In particular, the nonfinancial applications like social media, gaming, and metaverses – which can reasonably prioritize scale over all else – will look towards layer 2s as the best solution to quickly launch in the market.

Read more: Crypto 2023 – Full coverage

Decentralized science (DeSci) will take center stage as another major use case of Web3, open-source collaboration and decentralized fundraising. DAOs will be at the forefront of the movement.

In 2023, DeSci will turn scientific research into a Web3-native asset class through IP-NFTs (Intellectual Property NFTs), ushering a new age of scientific discovery comparable to the enormous breakthroughs witnessed in open source software development in the early 2000s. Fields like biotech will move from monopolistic innovation models to open-source, hyper-collaborative ecosystems where outcomes are more fundamentally aligned with patients and researchers.

In 2022, organizations such as Molecule have brought IP from leading universities across the globe on-chain, financed and supported by novel decentralized biotech organizations, such as VitaDAO. VitaDAO is a BioDAO on Ethereum building a portfolio of longevity assets and working to bring these technologies to market in a community-driven way, like a FlamingoDAO for biotech. BioDAOs are communities that fund and incubate IP-NFTs, and are already seeing traction, with four new entities participating in a new accelerator program, bio.xyz.

2023 will continue the rise of BioDAOs and IP-NFTs, as Fortune 500 organizations like Pfizer expand to cover more scientific fields and therapeutic areas.

The remaining vaporware blockchains will finally lose their positions as “top” blockchains as even speculative money leaves their ecosystems.

For years, vaporware blockchains like EOS and Cardano have remained among the “top” blockchains as measured by market cap (Cardano is in the top 10, EOS is in the top 40). These projects are still riding off of hype from their earliest days, having undergone almost no ecosystem development despite the breakneck innovation happening across the rest of Web3.

In the current depth of the bear market, Ethereum is maintaining (roughly) $1 billion in volume every 24 hours. Compare that to Cardano’s ~$1M and EOS’ ~$100,000 daily volume. The bear market hasn’t been kind to any network, but EOS has the unique standing of being responsible for the greatest value destruction based on original fundraising against current value, at $4.2 billion lost. Neither chain is living up to the promises made to early consumers. In 2023, even pre-initial coin offering institutional investors and the earliest retail investors will lose interest. The death knell will toll for these vaporware blockchains as they finally lose the last remaining mainstream supporters under the undeniable lack of on-chain adoption.

The growth in reputation projects, social networks, and decentralized identity will bring AML/KYC solutions down to the wallet level.

In 2022, a number of tools emerged that explored the ideas of social networks, reputation, and decentralized identities. These projects included soulbound tokens, ENS, POAPs and Lens. This focus on reputation and identity will increase in 2023, alongside increased regulation and consumer protection for DeFi use (at least in the U.S.). Verifiable credentials will become the data standard for off-chain credentials and attestations, with a focus on free, cheap, and privacy-first options that can be selectively disclosed by users. Where will these solutions come to head? We will see the first iteration of scalable reputation systems built using tools such as MetaMask Snaps, DIDs and VCs.

Prepare for more fallout.

The turmoil we’ve seen in crypto since May 2022 isn’t over. There are still buried bodies to be found from the excesses and impulses of the past years. Many people and companies have succeeded in obfuscating their exposure, but won’t be able to do so for much longer. Ultimately good for the ecosystem, this will unfortunately mean more consumer money will be lost, more trust betrayed and greater outside criticism. Keep building for the future, but prepare for more fallout in the near term.

In 2023, renewed attention will be paid to leading open-source development projects as a hedge against repeating past mistakes in crypto.

2022 was a massively formative year for open-source, internet-native organizations. The breadth and scale of problems that the Web3 community chose to tackle using these new models grew by an order of magnitude, and the impact these organizations can make for everyday people is starting to become a major theme.

As we’ve learned from cases like FTX, it’s far too easy for us to slip back into old habits and accidentally reinvent the same broken systems that centralize power rather than push it to the edges. In 2023, we’ll see more projects come to the conclusion that we need to take our own rhetoric seriously and start to make meaningful strides towards building open-source, community owned infrastructure; towards a world where digital public goods for any local online community can be provisioned in a mutualist way that strengthens trust rather than diminishing it or abstracting it. Two projects in particular will continue to define models of open-source funding and development: Gitcoin and Tea.xyz.

Gitcoin – which has distributed over $72 million in grants – is launching a “grants suite” that will enable any group to seamlessly empower their community members to coordinate funding for projects that address their shared needs. The suite will consist of Passport – a zero-knowledge identity verification tool – and two new protocols: a funding allocation protocol and project registry protocol.

Tea is a protocol that allows open-source developers to be remunerated for their contributions. Tea’s product suite includes a virtual environment manager, a universal interpreter, and a unified dependency manager. In the first month of launching its command-line interface, over 2,400 developers have starred in Tea's GitHub repository, making Tea’s community of over 16,000 developers one of the most rapidly growing groups on GitHub. In 2023, Tea will be building out its blockchain registry, license management and remuneration features.

The media will abandon its search for gods and find rational voices in crypto.

As major centralized finance (CeFi) and DeFi projects collapsed in the last year, so too did their founders and CEOs. These individuals had been ravenously propped up by the media, engendering misplaced trust by investors, companies and regulators. The media will need to face its misguided obsession with their crypto “gods” and seek out measured, rational voices in crypto. This will happen, slowly but surely, throughout 2023 as the true nature of more “gods” are revealed.

Fortunately, these rational folks won’t be hard to find for those genuinely interested in reporting on the reality of crypto. These new and old voices – notably humbler than the ones of the last two years – are building for the long term, and should be at the forefront of how the media reports on the space.

“Tech crypto” will become useful, replacing “money crypto” and setting the stage for the next bull market.

In Bill Hughes’ November CoinDesk op-ed, he explains the difference between “tech crypto” and “money crypto.” Tech crypto is about “peer-to-peer computer networks where participants transact by interacting with globally accessible software.” Money crypto is about “buying, holding, lending and trading tokens as investable assets.”

The past year has been dominated by money crypto in terms of popular adoption, regulatory attention, and consumer knowledge. Centralized exchanges have been the “beating heart” of money crypto, and the landscape of CeFi now has a microscope on it from regulators. The scrutinization of money crypto will result in the clarification of tech crypto as a related, but separate, field.

Tech crypto in 2023 will become more and more useful through two trends: 1) the movement of capital from centralized to decentralized financial applications and 2) the rise of non-financial decentralized applications like DeSci, social media, consumer rewards and more. The result will be a growing foundation of Web3 (i.e., tech crypto) adoption rather than just token (i.e., money crypto) adoption. This will set the stage for the next bull market and help hedge against volatile market cycles in the future as more capital is kept in transparent financial applications rather than shadowy centralized alternatives.

The “Great Decoupling” will accelerate, paving the way for stronger enterprise adoption of Ethereum.

In 2023, we will see the “Great Decoupling” and the consequent acceleration of enterprise adoption of Ethereum. As explained by Paul Brody, the Great Decoupling is when “the value proposition of Ethereum as a computing platform for enterprises finally gets separated from the focus on the price of Ethereum and financial speculation.” The focus on Ethereum’s enterprise utility will unlock greater enterprise innovation, spearheaded by organizations like EY building privacy technology on Ethereum. EY (Ernst & Young) now has industrial privacy solutions that support complex business logic, payments and transfers that run on public Ethereum. In the coming year, while enterprises can expect to see demand for audit and risk management go up, they can also expect to see growth in supply chain, procurement, and carbon traceability applications.

The world will understand the difference between CeFi and DeFi.

The only creditors made whole during the disasters of 2022 were Ethereum-based smart contracts, like those on Aave, where Celsius and Alameda Research repaid their loans to access collateral they posted to borrow dollars. Smart contracts didn’t need to retain Kirkland & Ellis or John Ray III for their reorganization, there was no negotiation and the technology worked transparently without fail as intended. The macro consequence of all this for 2023 will be a greater understanding – by individuals, financial institutions, investors, and regulators – of the difference between CeFi and DeFi. The former is where transactions are subjectively intermediated by humans who are able to improperly tamper with the database. The latter are where transactions are trustlessly and objectively intermediated by math and computer science without manipulation.