Summary:
Q1 2019 dapp market report summarizes the most comprehensive data and provides insights into 4 mainstream blockchains — Ethereum, EOS, Steem, and TRON—they represent the whole blockchain ecosystem with the most active users in the market.*There were dapps that were submitted to but not approved by Dapp.com due to reasons of sensitive contents, fraud, security issues, and etc. Those dapps’ data were NOT INCLUDED in this report.
Highlights:
Dapp Growth and Activity
- In the first quarter in 2019, a total of 504 dapps were added to Dapp.com, with Ethereum-based dapps dominated and accounted for more than half of the newly listed dapps. It shows that Ethereum is still the No.1 choice for developers to build their dapp on. At the same time, we also have seen a trend in multi-chain developing, as many Ethereum dapps expand on multiple chains, such as Ethereum + EOS or Ethereum + Tron.
- In terms of the dapp activeness, 95% of the EOS dapps remained active—with 326 out of the 341 dapps had transactions in the first quarter. More than 80% of dapps that were built on the Steem and TRON networks had active users, too. On the other hand, although beating other chains in terms of dapp amount, nearly 600 Ethereum dapps were in “inactive” status without a single transaction record over the past 3 months.
Dapp Volume
- The 4 mainstream blockchains remained strong in Q1 and hit a total transaction volume of $3.2 billion. EOS and TRON are the largest blockchains in dapp ecosystem—both of them processed over $1 billion transaction volume. As for Ethererum, the debate between PoS (or DPoS) and PoW will continue to center around the efficiency and suspected bot trading issue due to zero transaction fee.
User Growth and Activity
- TRON dapps had more than 300,000 active users, followed by EOS dapps with around 260,000 active users. By the end of Q1 2019, the number of the wallets created on TRON mainnet has exceeded $2.3 million, among them, 15.46% were dapp users, raised nearly 1.5 fold since the beginning of 2019. Moreover, more than 80% of the TRON dapp users have used and made at least one transaction in dapps over the last 3 months.
- The growth of new users was mainly driven by gambling dapps—which brought nearly 350,000 users to the dapp ecosystem. The increases of new users in games and exchanges were neck to neck, both sectors attracted around 90,000 new users in Q1.
Ethereum: Dapp Users Are Leaving Except Game Players
- The growth of dapp users did not keep up with the growth of Ethereum mainnet wallet addresses, the percentage of dapp users fell around 4% compared to last year. In the meantime, the stats show that many old Ethereum dapp users (who used dapps in 2018) were leaving gradually, only 72,422 old users are still using dapps in 2019, lower than 7%.
- The volume distribution on the Ethereum blockchain has not changed much from 2018, with DEXs contributing more than 50% of the volume, followed by gambling dapps. An interesting data here, the Ethereum gamers were the most active ones among all dapp users. More than 40% of the daily active dapp users were gamers but those people were only 30% of the total active users in Q1. The Ethereum-based games have already created a stable community with a group of loyal audience.
EOS: A More Diverse Dapp Ecosystem
- The distribution of the EOS dapp volume has changed a lot from 2018. Last year, EOS gambling dapps accounted for a striking 99% of its total volume. However, the dapp ecosystem on EOS has become more diverse since Q1 2019 with more games and financial service platforms joining the cohort.
Steem: The Steemians Are Getting Less Active
- Steem dapps are not just social dapps anymore. Gaming, gambling, tools, and other Steem dapps were thriving over the Q1. The gambling dapps climbed to 94% in total transaction volume, up 104.35%.
- According to data from SimilarWeb, Steemit, the largest dapp on Steem has monthly traffic of 10 million visits. But only less than 100,000 Steem's on-chain users in the first quarter. On Steem's blockchain, the “on-chain users” refers to those who have activities like transferring funds, voting, and posting content, and those activities are recorded on the blockchain.
TRON: Fastest Growing User Base With the Highest Single-Day Transaction Volume Ever
- TRON was the fastest growing dapp ecosystem in 2019. Both the number of mainnet wallets and the number of new dapp users had the highest growth rate. Notably, roughly 85% of TRON's dapp users had also used dapps in Q1, which was the highest user activeness among the 4 blockchains.
- The total transaction volume on TRON was also very impressive. It once surpassed $91 million on March 15, which was way beyond the historical highest record of Ethereum and EOS dapps.