2018 Dapp Market Report Summary and Highlights

Dapp.com's 2018 dapp market report summarize with data and insights into 4 mainstream blockchains - Ethereum, EOS, TRON, and STEEM - they represent the whole blockchain ecosystem with the most active dapp users in the market.

Highlights:

• 2018 was the first year of the “dapp movement”, although the cryptocurrency market was bumpy, the entire dapp market was flourishing and it contributed $6.7 billion throughout 2018. A fun fact - compared to 2009, the year Apple opened its App Store, there were over 65,000 mobile apps built on iOS and generated $4.2 billion in revenue. (Data source: Gartner)

• In 2018, DEX is the core contributor to the dapp market with almost 40% of the total transaction volume. Cryptocurrency trading was still in high demand and decentralized exchanges had proven to be one successful use cases of dapps.

• Betting took over the dominating role in the market since Q4. There was a total transaction volume of almost $ 3 Billion in Q4, almost 44% of the total volume in 2018. Betting has become the “killer apps” on blockchain due to proven fairness. The blooming betting dapp market was mainly contributed by EOS and TRON, the two high-speed DPoS blockchain built for decentralized apps.

• The number of blockchain games was still leading with a large proportion of 35%, following by pyramid (20%) and betting (around 20%). Overall, the dapp market is still driven by entertainment and gambling.

Ethereum

• Because of its first-mover advantage, the Ethereum blockchain still dominates the market in regards to the number of dapps, wallets, and dapp users. But compared to other blockchains, it has less transaction amount, and 2019 might be the challenging year for Ethereum especially for its scalability - its transaction speed will greatly affect the user experience. In addition, Ethereum is the only one of 4 blockchain in this report that needs gas fee for its transaction. The fact that users have to own ETH to start their experience with decentralized apps are also hindering the mass adoption for Ethereum dapps.

• The fluctuation of the Cryptocurrency market had a great impact on the usage of the Ethereum dapp since DEX is highly used among all Ethereum dapps. ForkDelta was the top dapp on Ethereum with 30% users of all the Ethereum dapp users. Cryptocurrency trading in a trurstless way is in high demand. On one hand, user has strong demand to trade while making sure their crypto assets are safe; on the other hand, a lot of tokens are being traded on DEX to avoid expensive listing fees on centralized exchanges. Therefore, the usage of dapps are highly affected by the demand of trading.

EOS

• EOS has become the largest blockchain in terms of transaction amounts and transaction volume within 2 quarters. 97% of transactions are from gambling, and 75% of transactions volume are contributed by betting games.

• EOS Masternodes are taking the key roles to expand the EOS dapp ecosystem. They had developed various of tools to facilitate account set up and resources lending. And a lot of EOS dapps were advised or invested by the Masternodes.

• The number of wallets on Mainnet is growing slow. Tron almost had twice as the amount of Mainnet account on EOS.

TRON

• TRON is the most ambitious in the dapp field, with a $2 billion Project Genesis launched in the second half of the year. In addition, it spends $100 million on TronArcade to promote its dapp ecosystem.

• Like EOS, TRON's Masternodes (Block Producers), known as Super Representatives on TRON, are actively promoting and supporting dapp's ecological construction. Many of the SR participants were formerly game developers, and we can expect more high-quality game production on TRON in 2019.

• Many of the Ethereum's early dapp developers are moving to TRON, including Ether Goo and various Farm Games (idle games).

STEEM

• We also see a higher adoption of STEEM dapps. 44.02% of all wallet(account) owners are actual dapp users(with Ethereum 2%, EOS 27.15%). Because of its social network attributes, plus the reward incentive, Steem dapps have a very solid user community base that was established in the early days.

• The social dapps on STEEM are no strangers to normal users, such as Steemhunt is a “Product Hunt on STEEM”, DTube is just like YouTube, and Steepshot reminds us of Instagram.

Data and Charts from Dapp.com's 2018 dapp market report