Pantera Capital Makes 2022 Predictions on NFTs, Layer 2s, and Ethereum Competitors

Crypto investment giant Pantera Capital has made predictions on this year involving several of the most important sectors in the market.

First appearing on CoinDesk, Pantera partner Paul Veradittakit elaborated on a set of predictions in the firm's latest newsletter.

Veradittakit predicts that a wave of adoption will push Ethereum to its limits, exacerbating network congestion and gas fees. This will ultimately bode well for optimistic and zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups, according to Veradittakit.

“Both optimistic and ZK rollups (a smart contract that takes hundreds of transactions off the main blockchain and bundles them into a single transaction) will gain even more traction in the coming year, with optimistic rollups likely to dominate in the short term while ZK rollups, which are much more technically complex, advance as a long-term scalability solution.”

Veradittakit also predicts a surge in activity among Ethereum competitors like Solana, and expects the SOL ecosystem to continue taking market share away from its big brother.

Noting how Ethereum had 97% of all DeFi aggregate total value locked (TVL) at the beginning of 2021, and then lost more than 34% of that, the investor predicts the trend will continue in favor of competitors like Solana which has “unparalleled transaction throughput.”

“Recent activity in the Solana community, including the launches of massive funds for decentralized social media and gaming, suggests that the ecosystem will continue to grow immensely in the coming year.”

Pantera Capital 

Form Veradittakit’s perspective, these trends will all lead to an acceleration of layer-1 chain adoption, and the fostering of “a truly robust, diverse multi-chain crypto ecosystem.”

The Pantera executive believes that the broad scope of Web3 can be boiled down to “technologies that prioritize user ownership of data and/or assets and interoperability between distinct applications.”

Based on this narrative picking up massive steam over 2021 – especially through NFTs – Veradittakit predicts that in 2022, we’ll see more projects “expand the scope of on-chain ownership, allowing users to have full, functional control over their identity and holdings in the digital world.”

Pantera Capital manages roughly $5 billion in assets, and its CEO Dan Morehead recently said a slew of different altcoins had immense potential in 2022, including Terra (LUNA) and Polkadot (DOT).

“I think we’re all coming to the conclusion that there won’t be just one blockchain in the future. There will be you know maybe 10 or 20 very important blockchains. And so Polkadot will help you move value from one to the other, and their first DeFi protocols are going live in the first quarter so we’re very excited about it.”