10 NFT Highlights of 2024
2024 was a comeback year for NFTs. Sure, things started off slow for the first three quarters, during which NFT market activity mostly declined as memecoins dominated.
But over the past couple of months, we've seen interest and activity surge here again, driven by renewed optimism around the broader prospects of the NFT ecosystem in 2025.
Yet just because 2024 began as a quieter year doesn't mean that it had any shortage of NFT highlights. Builders kept building, creators kept creating, and collectors kept collecting, leading to new minting records.
Let's look back on some of the standout happenings in NFTs over the past year to reflect on the developments that helped define onchain culture in 2024!
🟠 Bitcoin Puppets Arrive
Ever since Ordinals crafted a new avenue for Bitcoin NFTs in 2023, many collectors have been wondering: which project will become the CryptoPunks of Ordinals? While that question remains to be definitively answered, one collection has decisively pulled ahead of the pack here: Bitcoin Puppets.
Created by Le Fou and released via a $10 mint in January, the Puppets are a 10k PFP collection featuring charmingly absurd monkey puppets adorned with counterculture and crypto in-joke traits.
Since then, the Puppets have dominated. They now boast a 0.12 BTC floor price ($12,000 currently) and the largest market cap of any Ordinals collection at $115 million, making them the biggest non-Ethereum NFT project today.
Perhaps another Ordinals collection will eventually beat out the Puppets. But with BTC bouncing around $100k and innovation progressing around Bitcoin Layer 2s (e.g., OP_CAT and CatVM), they're sitting pretty atop the Bitcoin NFT ecosystem at a time when Ordinals seem poised for their next big wave of attention.
🟣 Farcaster Frame Mints
Farcaster has become one of the Ethereum ecosystem's most popular onchain social networks, and the builders dropped a game changer in January with the release of Farcaster Frames.
Frames have paved the way for interactive, app-like experiences within Farcaster posts, allowing users to do things like play games, vote on polls, and mint NFTs in one click directly in their social feeds.
That said, a non-trivial amount of the NFT minting activity in the Ethereum ecosystem this year was facilitated by the Farcaster Frames + Base + Zora combo. With 87% of NFT deployments happening on Base and Zora Network in 2024, Farcaster has positioned itself well to be at the center of a lot more NFT minting activity going forward. Keep your eyes peeled here, too, as Frames v2 just arrived.
🔵 The 404 Standards
One of the biggest technical shakeups in 2024 came from the rise of ERC-404 and its successor DN-404, two experimental standards that blend fungible tokens (ERC-20) with non-fungible tokens (ERC-721).
Launched by the Pandora team, ERC-404 introduced a system where holding or transferring ERC-20 tokens automatically minted or burned corresponding NFTs, unlocking a new way to bridge liquidity and digital collectibles.
While the concept captivated the NFT and DeFi communities, it wasn’t without drawbacks. The "ERC" naming drew fire since it wasn't an official standard, and ERC-404’s gas inefficiency sent Ethereum fees soaring, sparking debates about its viability.
Enter DN-404. Developed as a slicker alternative, DN-404 split the functionality across two contracts—one for ERC-20s and another for mirrored ERC-721s. This approach offered the same "hybrid token" benefits while significantly improving gas efficiency.
Altogether, then, the 404 standards opened the door to new token mechanics by offering more liquid possibilities around NFTs. Whether they stick around remains to be seen, but they certainly pushed boundaries here this year.
⚫️ Blobs Axe Mint Costs
Ethereum's Dencun upgrade in March 2024 revolutionized the NFT landscape with the introduction of EIP-4844 and its innovative blobs.
The big idea? This new data structure has allowed L2 rollups to store transaction data on the mainnet much more efficiently and cost-effectively.
The impact has been huge. L2s like Base, Optimism, and Zora Network reported gas fee reductions of up to 99% after Dencun, now making NFT minting on these platforms nearly free at just fractions of a cent.
As such, the blobspace fee revolution has paved the way for Ethereum’s L2s to become go-to hubs for accessible and scalable NFT experiences, from gasless drops to high-volume onchain gaming and beyond.
🔴 Crypto: The Game S2
Crypto: The Game returned for its highly anticipated Season 2 in April 2024, this time with a fresh twist—players competed on "Anon Island" atop Base, with the option to stay totally anonymous.
Entry came through NFT passes minted for 0.1 ETH, which not only granted access to the game but also contributed to a ~$250,000 prize pool. The season retained its Survivor-inspired format but introduced new dynamics around tradable NFTs. As players were voted out, their “Player” NFTs evolved into Jury NFTs, giving them the power to vote on the final winner.
Following its run, Season 2 culminated in a dramatic finale where Player #733—backed by a pop-up collective of Jury voters—claimed victory and donated their ETH winnings to the legal defense of Tornado Cash's devs.
But the fun didn’t stop there. In June, CTG was acquired by Uniswap Labs, signaling Uniswap’s ambitions to integrate more immersive onchain experiences into its ecosystem. Also, CTG made crypto history by earning a spot on the 2024 Emmy ballot for Emerging Media, marking a milestone as one of the first NFT games to gain mainstream media recognition.
Next up? Season 3 in 2025!
🔵 Zora's Evolution
Zora, the app + protocol + L2 combo, doubled down on its mission to become the capital of onchain creativity in 2024.
For example, back in May, we saw Zora acquire mint.fun, the popular NFT aggregator platform that has powered millions of NFT mintings.
In July, Zora introduced Sparks, a new Ethereum denomination where one Spark equals one millionth of an ETH. Represented by the ✧ symbol, Sparks simplify pricing for small onchain transactions—think “100 Sparks” instead of “0.0001 ETH.”
Following Sparks, the project redefined what NFT trading can look like with onchain secondary markets, integrating liquidity with Uniswap such that Zora mints now can now toggle between an ERC-20 mode and an NFT mode for easier trading.
Last but certainly not least, Zora also launched a gas-free mobile app for Apple and Android users this year. The app offers a slick Instagram-like social platform where NFT minting is streamlined for both creators and collectors.
All that said, these various UX breakthroughs have Zora positioned as dominantly as ever in the Ethereum ecosystem's NFT scene.
🟢 Onchain Gaming Wave
Fully onchain games (FOCGs) operate entirely on blockchain tech like Ethereum or L2s, and in doing so, they optimize for transparency, true asset ownership via tokens like NFTs, and user-generated content.
If you're into these types of titles, then you were in luck in 2024 because developments in this scene came hot and fast over the past year.
For instance, Lattice unveiled its onchain gaming L2, Redstone, where autonomous worlds like Biomes are on the rise. Pirate Nation saw so much activity it had to deploy a second chain. Strategy titles like Influence and Eternum also launched, and up-and-comers like Kamigotchi and Primodium ramped up testnet gameplay.
These advances are just some of the highlights we saw here this year, but they point toward a promising future for FOCGs in 2025 and beyond.
⚪️ AI Experiments Surge
2024 was a year where attention and experiments around AI x NFTs surged.
- Botto, an AI artist that auctions its art via NFTs, re-entered the spotlight after its infra and DAO first launched in 2021.
- Onchain Gaias—a mix between AI agents, a PFP collection, and crypto games—became one of the biggest NFT projects on Base and devised an AI Agent Vault (AIAV) system for storing agents onchain.
- Virtuals Protocol is now a popular framework for launching AI agents on Base, and it's underpinned by a unique Immutable Contribution Vault (ICV) mechanism that uses NFTs to track contributions to agents' growth over time.
- The DX Research Group recently unveiled their DX01: SINGULARITY experiment, where people could mint NFTs to prolong the life of the underlying, video-generating Echo AI.
These are just a handful of examples of the new ways of thinking that we started seeing at the AI and NFT crossroads over the last year, but surely, it's just a taste of what's to come at this intersection in 2025.
Jun Dec 20, 2024 • 5 min read
🟠 Pudgy Penguins Launch PENGU
Pudgy Penguins have been one of the few major NFT collections that seemed mostly immune to the effects of the past bear market. Where many other projects died, the Penguins showed consistent strength.
Fortunately, they started lending that strength to the wider space when they announced and thereafter recently launched their $PENGU ecosystem token.
The excitement here not only temporarily led to the floor price of the Pudgys crossing $100k, but it also catalyzed a bidding wave of buy pressure across the entire NFT ecosystem as people started returning their attention to other prospects in the NFT space.
While it remains to be seen how $PENGU will play out in 2025, there's a strong chance that Pudgy Penguins will continue to serve as a tank, putting basically all other PFP NFTs on their back in drumming up lots of excitement for digital collectibles in general.
🔵 OpenSea's OS2 Rollout
ocean enters the chat 🌊
— OpenSea Foundation (@openseafdn) December 20, 2024
In November 2024, OpenSea announced that its made-over "OS2" platform would be launching in December. At the time, I speculated that the new OS2 vision might involve various new strategic prongs, like an OpenSea wallet, an OpenSea Layer 2, an OpenSea token, etc.
For now, OpenSea still hasn't launched OS2 to the public, but that should be coming any day now. But with word of a points program and a new OpenSea Foundation spreading around, it seems that the big NFT bang at the end of the year will be the NFT marketplace giant throwing down the gauntlet once more!