Current Status of Ethereum DApps
Decentralized applications (DApps) was cheered as one of the prime use cases for blockchain technologies. The industry has put a lot of trust in DApps, and platforms supporting their development have become popular in recent years.
Some of the huge crypto projects supporting DApps development platform include Ethereum (ETH), EOS (EOS), Tron (TRX), Cardano (ADA), Stellar (XLM), and Neo (NEO).
What is DApps?
Internet users don’t have full control over the data that is spread on websites.
Ethereum is unique in that way. It tries to flourish the blockchain as a way to correct what its designers believe is a difficult part of the Internet’s design.
It’s like a “decentralized app store” where anyone can release their unstoppable apps (DApps), which is not similar to today’s apps and don’t require a middleman to function or manage a user’s information.
DApps connect users and providers directly.
If we use this design for a decentralized Twitter, that’s resistant to censorship. Once you publish a message to the blockchain, it cannot be erased, not even by the company that created the microblog system.
The main feature is that they’re open source and don’t have a central point of failure.
While cryptocurrencies providing support to DApps development states that they are highly beneficial, this may be unreasonably high when looking at the true value they provide, because DApps adoption is slim to none.
According to research by LongHash, a blockchain analysis and research firm, a slender 180 out of 1,812 Ethereum DApps have connected to ERC20 transactions on any given day. The researchers conclude that only 10% of Ethereum DApps were active as on February 1, 2019.
If we dig deeper into DApps usage on Ethereum, LongHash finally said that out of the 180 DApps being actively used, just 13% had more than 100,000 transactions in the past 24 hrs, while 19% had somewhere in between 10,000 to 100,000 transactions.
The LongHash’s research came to a conclusion based on data from Feb 1st alone. To some extent this data is impressive, considering the current state of the market. But many in the crypto world think that DApps have a very far way to go. Kevin Rooke, a Canadian crypto researcher & industry commentator said
There are now 1375 live ETH dApps.
86% of them had 0 users today.
93% of them had 0 tx volume today.Across all platforms there are now 1828 live dApps.
77% of them had 0 users today.
85% of them had 0 tx volume today. pic.twitter.com/jUHZYuhPTz— Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) February 10, 2019
Rooke Twitter data explains that according to DApps Radar, 86% of live applications on the previously mentioned blockchain had zero users on Saturday. Moreover, a basic 7% of DApps running on Ethereum had more than zero ETH in transaction volumes over the past 24 hours.
This lack of DApps usage made industry experts to question the requirement of DApps for many applications. One of expert asking this question is Saifedean Ammous, the world-renowned author of “The Bitcoin Standard.”
Saifedean Ammous explained the value of decentralized applications following Rooke’s tweet, saying that from what he could tell, centralizing most, if not all of Ethereum DApps would likely be a best logical action.
Rooke agreed to an extent without opposing, he stated:
“I agree. Perhaps some gambling DApps will see traction though, much more difficult for gov’t to regulate/shut them down.”
He then added the various advantages for gambling applications to be decentralized, stating:
“[Decentralization] protects the creator of the DApps, easy for gov’t to come after people running centralized gambling operations. Also, open-source code means gamblers can be certain of the odds they’re getting.”
Despite Rooke’s points for decentralization, Ammous largely disagreed with Rooke.
The blockchain scalability may be excessive. Some are working to enable hundreds and thousands of transactions per second, while the real truth is that many DApps do not even need many transactions per day.
