5 NFT Trends to Watch in Entertainment in 2022, According to 8 Experts

• 2021 was the breakthrough year for NFTs, which generated $14.1 billion in sales. 
• Hollywood, NFT industry, and investing insiders offered Insider predictions for the tech in 2022. 
• As NFTs go mainstream, expect more native IP, utility, and volatility for the crypto asset.

If 2021 was the breakthrough year for NFTs, 2022 may well be the year the hyped crypto assets go mainstream — with big implications for entertainment — as eight Hollywood, NFT industry, and investing insiders predicted to Insider.

NFTs generated $14.1 billion in sales this year — up from $65 million in 2020, according to nonfungible.com — as Hollywood joined in the digital gold rush. Warner Bros. sold out of “Matrix Resurrections”-inspired NFTs (all 100,000 of them); an NFT of a previously unreleased Whitney Houston song demo was auctioned off for nearly $1 million. 

Quentin Tarantino plans to sell “Pulp Fiction” NFTs of seven scenes from his screenplay — though he has some legal hurdles to clear first. Even Dick Wolf, the “Law & Order” and “Chicago” producer, entered the fray with “The Wolf Society,” a “membership-based society for online detectives powered by Non-Fungible Tokens.”   

NFTs will become fully mainstream

Like many leaders in cryptocurrency, the executives and investors who spoke to Insider are bullish on NFTs’ momentum growing in 2022, as consumers become more familiar with the tech. Andrei Brasoveanu, a partner at VC firm Accel, said he expects individual holders of NFTs to go from the single-digit millions to tens of millions. 

“We’re betting on mainstream adoption,” said Scott Greenberg, the CEO of Fox’s animation studio Bento Box and its Blockchain Creative Labs, who added “we’ll see the depths of use with more mainstream opportunities, and a few of the more functional [uses] than just, ‘What’s this digital thing that I’ve collected?'” 

The current nomenclature may not be as lasting, predicted Ben Arnon, chief revenue officer at Curio, which launched “The Wolf Society” with Wolf Entertainment. “As the concept becomes mainstream, the term NFTs will fade and give way to digital assets,” he said, citing previous disruptions in music. “Think mp3s shifting to iTunes and

streaming

.”

Creators will generate IP that’s ‘native to the NFT world’                  

“Hollywood players will start to create IP” that is “native to the NFT world,” predicted Rich Battista, a Curio investor and adviser who previously spent nearly two decades as an executive at Fox and served as CEO of other entertainment companies. 

Independent creators will also see opportunity in the space. “Rather than launch initial IP maybe through comic books or podcasts,” said Arnon, “for the creator, if they can incubate IP and actually have success in the NFT space, that gives them tremendous leverage as they walk into deals in the film and TV space down the road.”

NFTs will provide more utility

Utility NFTs, a type of digital asset that includes a tangible benefit or perk — sometimes an IRL experience — will also become more common.

“If you think about a music NFT, for example, not only do you have the image associated with data, but it … might buy you the rights to go backstage to meet the artist,” said Accel partner Maya Noeth. Kings of Leon in March partnered with NFT marketplace YellowHeart and became the first band to release an album in the form of an NFT that also offered exclusive artwork or VIP seats at upcoming tours.

NFTs will become ‘a gateway for entering the metaverse’

NFTs should prove more useful across different platforms, including the much-hyped metaverse, which has dominated tech discourse in recent months. “NFTs are kind of this gateway, as it gets kind of more mainstream … for entering the metaverse,” said Curio COO Rikin Mantri.

“You can now take them into a virtual world, interact with them, and start to interact with other folks,” he added, envisioning communities like “a fan club in the metaverse.” 

NFTs are generally secure and difficult to hack, which makes them an ideal digital passport of sorts. “If Fortnite throws a concert on platform, your ticket could be the NFT, but then you could take that NFT and also go to a concert on Roblox or one of the other platforms that are out there,” said Mantri.

NFTs will continue to be volatile investments

Just because NFTs become more commonplace doesn’t mean they’ll be immune to the rising and falling valuations that have characterized the space. This year, celebrity NFTs from Grimes and rapper A$AP Rocky, for instance, lost much of their value after being sold, according to Bloomberg. 

While Noeth believes NFTs will generally be “durable” in their value, she noted that very speculative trends — “certain game NFTs,” she said, “are selling for really high prices before the game is even launched” — will contribute to continued

volatility

, at least in the short term.