Fantasy and Reality: DApps' Ups and Downs at the 'Center of

DD Think Tank, an analysis team under ChainDD has spent two months carrying out in-depth tracking and analysis of the cryptocurrency market and its performance, finalizing 2018-2019 Cryptocurrency Market Annual Report: Reset the starting point of value. DD Think Tank team collected, processed and analyzed more than 100,000 pieces of data of the global cryptocurrency industry and integrated more than 900 digital currency governance policies from 224 countries and regions, covering dozens of vertical segments. Furthermore, the team performed a weighted index calculation with a selection of 12 mainstream coin trading pairs at head exchanges, using the composite DD index to reflect the conditions, trend and fluctuations of the whole market.

Data from DApp statistics websites including dappradar, dapp.com, spider.store and Dapp.Total from January 1, 2018 has been comprehensively analyzed, resulting in a full analysis of the state of Dapp's implementation on Ethereum, EOS and TRON's public blockchain to demonstrate the development results of the year: technologies advanced but people were repeating the same things again and again.

By December 31, 2018, globally, there were in total 1,609 DApps on mainstream public blockchains, among which, 1,324 were on Etheruem, accounting for more than 80%. Since June, the number of DApps on EOS increased steadily, reaching 228, accounting for 14%. TRON, as a relatively new public blockchain, had a shorter development period and the number of DApps on it was small, totaling 57 and accounting for 3% of all DApps.

Currently, DApps can be categorized into gaming, betting, encrypted collectibles and trading. Among them, betting and gaming DApps occupy the top two positions firmly, accounting for 29% and 26% of all DApps respectively. Furthermore, there are risks in some of the DApps' smart contracts and logics, and therefore another group of DApps are categorized as high risk DApps, in order for participants to exercise caution.

The top two categories in terms of numbers of daily active users were gaming and trading. After duplicates were removed, the highest number of daily active users was only in the thousands and overall, the activity level was relatively low. However, judging from the aspect of trading volume, trading and betting categories occupied the top two positions firmly while gaming ranked at the bottom. Meanwhile, head DApps of each category played a significant role and DApps ranked in the top ten accounted for 80% of numbers of daily users and trading volumes. What's also worth noticing was the proportion of DApps with high risks was still high, accounting for roughly 20% of all DApps. The risks can be categorized into two types: the first type of risks was the intrinsic loopholes of smart contracts, namely, susceptibility to black box operations and hackers' attacks and thus the fairness of games could not be guaranteed. The second type of risks was incurred by games which promised high returns and high profitability which actually were Ponzi schemes, possessing risks.

DD Think Tank sorted the data and discovered that the number of DApps on Ethereum experienced fluctuating rise and reached its annual peak in May, which saw more than 205 monthly new DApps. In June, with the launching of EOS mainnet, the increase of DApps on Ethereum slowed down significantly. However, in October, the increase shot up again and the number of monthly new DApps approached 200. Afterwards, in November and December, the number of new DApps experienced sharp fall and was on par with the number at the beginning of the year.

DD Think Tank sorted the data and discovered that the number of DApps on Ethereum experienced fluctuating rise and reached its annual peak in May. In June, with the launching of EOS mainnet, the increase of DApps on Ethereum slowed down significantly. However, in October, the increase shot up again and the number of monthly new DApps approached 200. Afterwards, in November and December, the number of new DApps experienced sharp fall and was on par with the number at the beginning of the year.