KuCoin Labs, the investment and research force of crypto exchange KuCoin, has released its 2021-Q3 ‘Crypto Industry Report’.

The dossier is mainly focused on the trending topics in the crypto space such as financial and economic attributes of GameFi that will probably continue to capture users.

In addition, the report says the DeFi craze gradually subsided and the market entered a stable period while more attention was paid to GameFi and SocialFi in the second half of the year.

KuCoin Labs noted that the main challenge for GameFi was the regulatory barrier.

“Just like in the early stage of token development, regulatory authorities judge the nature of different STOs in order to better regulate them,” the report said.

According to the document, SocialFi is becoming a new trend. More and more people believe that SocialFi may be the next potential growth sector because ‘social’ is highly demanded by Web 3.0.

Following the heat of DeFi Summer, other trending areas such as NFT emerged by creating more value while aggregating an increasing amount of capital in the sectors.

By diving deep into the blockchain infrastructure, the report also evaluates the current stage of Layer2 and figures out the intensifying market competition as Layer2 matures as ETH 2.0 finally approaches.

Metaverse as new crypto driver

Lou Yu, the head of KuCoin Labs, said the metaverse was becoming a new traffic portal for the crypto industry.

“However, as still in the early stage, the building of metaverse infrastructure is one of the top priorities to be addressed,” Yu stressed.

“KuCoin Labs will continue to support metaverse with high-quality research and the exploration of promising metaverse projects.

“Recently, KuCoin Labs launched a $100 million Metaverse Fund to empower early-stage Metaverse projects.”

According to CEO Johnny Lyu, the KuCoin Metaverse Fund will be used to invest in GameFi, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised infrastructure projects.

As stated in the report, “the target audience of the crypto-asset industry is constantly expanding”.

“With the improvement of blockchain underlying infrastructure, ETH 2.0 upgrade, and the launch of alternative expansion solution Polygon, user experience and stickiness will be greatly enhanced.”