The popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain gaming, and play-to-earn (P2E) games might have caught your attention, whether a cryptocurrency enthusiast or a non-native in the field. Following the immense value growth of the field and projects such as Axie Infinity, Decentraland, and The Sandbox reaching unicorn status, everyone is demanding a piece of the industry.
2021 was a very successful year for the NFT-related industry (gaming, collectibles, and assets), whereby a total of over $15 billion in trading volumes in the past year, reaching an all-time high daily trading volume of $391 million in December last year. As the industry witnessed exponential growth, some projects stood out in 2021, as mentioned above. In this article, we focus on the five play-to-earn projects we set our eyes on to experience magnanimous growth this year.
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Enjin: Gaming metaverse
As one of the oldest metaverse projects today, Enjin coin could well resurrect in 2022, if the blockchain play-2-earn industry explodes. Rising tides carry all! Nonetheless, the team behind the NFT gaming project extends to over 20 countries and thousands of developers, which could play a role in seeing wide acceptance from the newly-incoming NFT fanatics. With over 250,000 gaming communities and 18.7 million registered gamers since its launch in 2009, the platform shows great promise in leading the GameFi ecosystem.
2.PlotX: “X-to-earn platform”
PlotX is a decentralized “X-to-earn” platform that offers a full suite of developer tools for projects to build their own digital economies atop the blockchain. Its “x-to-earn” model involves an integrated layer that allows any third party to come in and create an “x-2-earn” ecosystem. Currently, the platform offers Pay-2-earn, play-2-earn, invest-2-earn, stake-to-earn, and build-to-earn ecosystems.
At the moment, prediction markets are the most popular projects on the platform, but in the near future (as the user base grows), they plan to partner with other development teams and launch internal applications to offer users as many opportunities to earn as possible.
3.Gala Games: Ecosystem
One of the most promising blockchain gaming projects today. Gala Games is a decentralized gaming ecosystem that builds “games that players actually want to play”. The platform includes over 16,000 games in its ecosystem, each of them offering a user-friendly, blockchain-invisible metaverse to make the game fun, as you earn. 
According to Coingecko, the $GALA token has exploded over 2,000% in the past year to $0.33 as of writing. The market capitalization stands at $2.5 billion, making it the third-largest GameFi project, behind The Sandbox ($SAND) and Axie Infinity ($AXS).
4.DeFi Kingdoms: Play-2-earn
DeFi Kindom ($JEWEL) is also on our list as a prospective top performer in the Play-2-earn ecosystem. According to its website, DeFi Kingdoms (DFK) is a game, a decentralized exchange (DEX), a liquidity pool (LP) opportunity, and a market of rare utility-driven NFTs, that aim to offer users a new, exciting way to earn. 
The platform also used fantasy pixel art on its games. Defi Kingdoms effectively blends DeFi, NFTs, and metaverse aspects to create an effective working economy which is one of the driving forces of its exponential growth.
5.UniX: Guild games
With guilds and community gaming getting more popular by the day, UniX is our close-out selection in this list. As one of the earliest adopters of the play-2-earn gaming models, the project has grown its userbase to over 500,000 users on the platform and created the biggest gaming community (guild) worldwide, with more than 145,000 members. The platform also launched scholarships which have attracted over 5,000 scholars to date. Could community gaming be the future of P2E?
Conclusion
With the popularity of blockchain-based games increasing by the day, there are multiple opportunities for players to enjoy the game while making extra income. The list above is in no way exhaustive. It shows some of the projects that may well experience explosive growth this year if the mainstream gaming industry takes note of its incentives and advantages. With a projected market value of $300 billion by 2025, the play-2-earn gaming industry could revolutionize the gaming world as we know it.
