Dapps have been around for a long time. Yet, it was not until 2018 that Dapps came to the forefront and started enjoying the limelight of the rapidly evolving cryptocurrency and blockchain space. 2018 was the first true “Year of the Dapps” and the rise of blockchain games like Cryptokitties, Non-fungible token marketplaces like Opensea, and now a growing ecosystem of Dapps built upon various platforms like Ethereum, NEO, EOS, and TRX imply that the Dapp space is ripe for mass adoption.
DappRadar, the leading Dapp ecosystem aggregator, recently released an industry-first tracking feature for tracking full token transaction volumes for EOS Dapps. The initial results of the volume underestimation that has been uncovered by this tracker are staggering – potentially over $1 billion of hidden value within the EOS ecosystem. A closer, analytical look at the implications of this tracker shed light on the potential implications it could have towards the growth of the entire Dapp ecosystem.
$1 Billion of Hidden EOS Value?
There was a reported increase in trading volume of over $3 million per day in the first week of launching the EOS tracker since it also now included the tracking of non-native tokens. If a similar rate sustained over the course of 365 days, the total value comes to just over a billion dollars. Decrypt reported that DappRadar saw a 25% increase in volume onto the EOS blockchain on the date of the tracker release (15th October 2019).
For instance, Newdex, a decentralized exchange (DEX) based on the EOS blockchain has seen the addition of around $5 million value in non-native tokens within the last 7 days at the time of writing on top of their $21 million value in native EOS tokens. On the date of the tracker release, Newdex showed an additional $1.6 million non-native daily transaction volume on top of their $1.8 million EOS transaction volume that day. Although the overall percentages of non-native transaction volumes have fallen slightly across the board over the past two weeks, DappRadar is reportedly going to launch new trackers on other blockchains like Ethereum and Tron soon.
Implications on the Dapp Industry
The addition of this tremendous value could potentially impact the Dapp ecosystem with renewed interest from investors and mainstream media, who have been largely ignoring the Dapp ecosystem. Earlier in September of this year, DappRadar closed a $2.33 million seeding round of funding led by investment firms such as Naspers, Blockchain.com Ventures, and Angel Invest Berlin. DEXs and Dapps like Newdex and DICE could potentially receive additional interest from both investors and the public due to the reveal of this additional volume flying under the radar all this while.
“This will greatly increase the transparency of value creation on the EOS blockchain, especially for decentralized exchanges that support the trading of EOS-based tokens.”,
Furthermore, by ranking EOS-based Dapps by their actual total smart-contract volume instead of relying only on native tokens, DappRadar is leading the way forward to increase the transparency of value creation in the Dapp ecosystem. Coindesk reported in June of this year that 75% of EOS Dapp transactions were made by bots. They mentioned that bot activity threatened the ‘integrity of the blockchain’ and although the introduction of this tracker does not directly solve the bot problem, it is a step in the right direction towards the Dapp ecosystem’s vision of achieving true decentralization whilst remaining transparent and accurate in its functionality and metrics. Dappradar also plans on introducing a more robust filtering and manipulation detector aiming at removing fake, bot and manipulated traffic within the coming months.
DappRadar: Launch of ETH Tracker & More
In their Medium post, DappRadar also mentioned that they would roll out similar tracking features for more protocols including Ethereum and Tron. An Ethereum full token tracking feature could potentially be game-changing in revealing the true state of the Ethereum Dapp ecosystem through a huge volume addition. How much exactly you ask? Somewhere around a staggering estimated $10 billion of additional volume potentially. With over 60% of all the Dapps on DappRadar being Ethereum-based (1629 Ethereum Dapps), it is not hard to see this estimated volume being reached and potentially be underestimated.
In line with their vision of pushing the Dapp ecosystem forward, DappRadar also recently added support for Dapps running on the NEO blockchain. Tracking NEO tokens accurately has proven to be a challenge due to how NEO allows multiple wallets to send and receive tokens, unlike other Protocols. For instance, if one person can send and receive tokens to multiple wallets, then it counts every wallet as a user. However, DappRadar is reportedly aiming to solve this problem by batching users sending from the same wallet addresses together.
The future seems bright for the Dapp industry. If 2018 was the ‘Year of the Dapps’, 2020 could well go on to become the ‘Year of Dapp Mass Adoption’ with companies such as DappRadar pushing the ecosystem forward.
