DApp-platforms: When Mass Market Adoption?

Decentralized applications (dApps) are getting more popular day by day. It all started with Ethereum, which was launched in July 2015, and became the first platform for dApp in the blockchain ecosystem. Today, EOS, NEO and TRON are actively promoted on the market. Currently, the main race is among these platforms. Bitnewstoday monitors their development to assess which one will eventually gain the upper hand and become the most effective and relevant.

However, the competition among dApp-platforms is severe already. Project leaders have a slightly aggressive marketing and do not exclude attacks on each other — just recall regular Twitter skirmishes between Vitalik BUTERIN from Ethereum and Justin SUN from TRON. Well, that is all about PR, but in practice — what are the most popular platforms today? Let's see and examine the current situation.

Ethereum

Currently, there are more than 2,300 dApp applications based on the Ethereum blockchain. According to the State of the Dapps website, around 12,000 people are daily active users of these applications. The Ethereum blockchain is a basis for popular applications such as Storj, IDEX, and Augur. Popular categories include games, exchanges, wallets, storage, finance, management, energy, social networks, media, identifiers, security, and insurance.

While being the phenomenon establisher, Ethereum has long been most popular. The disadvantage of the platform is the scalability problem, which must be solved for the project to remain in the lead. In this regard, EOS and TRON are right behind. They have already overtaken the dApp pioneering platform in some terms.

EOS

EOS launched its platform in 2018 after a successful ICO, which attracted more than $4 billion. The community had high hopes for the project. After a shaky start, the platform is gradually gaining momentum; the number of applications is growing exponentially. The most popular dApp categories on EOS include regular and gambling ones.

According to the State of the Dapps, at the time of this writing, 224 applications are running on the EOS platform. The number of active users exceeds 41,000. DApps with the most significant number of users are Endless Dice, EOS Knights, Candy Box, EOSBET Dice, and Farm EOS.

The main disadvantage of EOS is the weak decentralization of the platform, and this repels many developers from it.

TRON

According to dappradar, TRON has 166 applications on the platform. Most of the functional applications are in the gambling category. The best of them are TronBet, Fishing Master and TronWin. The most popular application, however, is not from the gambling category — it is Tron Trade, an exchange dApp.

Three most popular TRON applications process about 285,000 transactions in 24 hours. For comparison, the top three dApps on Ethereum process about 2,800 operations in 24 hours.

NEO

Currently, NEO has developed 76 applications on the blockchain. The most featured of them are QLC Chain, NEX, Zeepin and Red Pulse. The most popular dApps on the NEO blockchain are exchanges, media, service, games, and identification. Even though NEO has a transaction speed of up to 2433 TPS, the average transaction speed is below 400 TPS, which often forces developers to leave the platform. Downtime of the platform is another issue — it was also recorded several times.

Other dApp platforms and industry problems

There are other platforms like AION, ICON, Cardano, Wanchain, Lisk, Tezos which are also developing actively. The competition for the massive introduction has just begun, and everyone wants to get a piece of Ethereum cake. So far, the most popular category is gambling, exchanges, and storage services.

However, is everything going well? On February 11, Twitter user Kevin ROOKE published some sad statistics: 93% of Ethereum applications did not perform any transactions for the whole day.

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) 10 февраля 2019 г.

The provocative message caused a new wave of discussion and criticism, and the problem lies not only in Ethereum. If you look at the statistics of other platforms, you will observe quite the same. Critics believe that platforms are still raw; mass adoption of technology is impossible while applications don’t have the proper quality, and that fact does not retain users. Ardent users claim that dApps are doomed to fail eventually. The defenders of technology point out that the result is achieved: there is growth, and the market must be given some time.

However, no one can deny the obvious problems: in 2019, Ethereum is more than ever focused on solving the issues of platform scalability. EOS is more focused on creating a dynamic ecosystem that can compete with Ethereum. TRON is focused on aggressive marketing and dev teams recruiting.

Ethereum has a large number of serious rivals, and they are not only EOS and TRON, other platforms demonstrate a high rate of development too. It is likely that 2019 will show severe changes in the market for decentralized applications. From a user point of view, it is a good sign — a high level of competition will inevitably affect the quality, and the quantum leap of mass adoption is quite likely to take place.

Image courtesy of The Merkle