State of DApps - 5 Killer DApps You Should Know

Decentralized applications are seeing rapid adoption among the crypto community as 2019 proved to be a tremendous year for DApps. 2019 made a lot of impact on the state of DApps as the growing interest in DApps among the crypto community members led to more than 3.26 billion transactions on the blockchain in 2019. 

The number of active DApp users jumped dramatically in 2019. There were 3.11 million active DApp users in 2019, which was more than double of the 2018 numbers. The number of active DApp users grew by over 210% in 2019 adding 2.77 million more DApp users to that of the number of active DApp users in 2018. This number is expected to see a similar growth for 2020.

Now, let's explore the top five DApps currently.

State of DApps #1: Kyber

The DeFi community considers Kyber to be one of the core parts that has contributed to the astounding growth of the decentralized finance sector. It allows anyone to exchange 70+ Ethereum-based tokens through its simple to use interface. 

Kyber has led the ranking of almost all the lists about top-ranked Ethereum-based DApps. It is one of the most popular DApps in terms of the total volume of USD trade & the number of daily active users. It reached a milestone of almost 1 million transactions recently with a gross trading volume of $1 billion. 

It is very easy to use. You can connect to Kyber through an Ethereum-supported wallet like Ledger, Trezor, or Metamask. The users can also download the Kyber app from the Google Play Store or Apple App store. Further, a user can start by selecting the tokens that they want to exchange on Kyber. The token can be selected from the drop-down menus available on the interface from where the users can exchange their tokens into their desired Ethereum-based token. 

State of DApps #2: Neutrino Protocol 

Lightning is the buzzword of the crypto world these days. There is no doubt about it being a very exciting development for sure. However, lightning users have to run a full node for doing any transactions in it. The introduction of the Neutrino Protocol has solved this issue as it ensures that the light clients get the data without compromising their privacy. It does all these without trusting a central server. 

Neutrino protocol verifies payments and it undertakes most of the verification work on the client-side. In this protocol, all the transactions that happen within the block are compressed & sent to the client, instead of it being filtered by the servers. This puts the responsibility of recognizing the transactions that the client took part in on the clients. Thereafter, the clients request for a full block confirmation if they find transactions relevant to their wallet. 

At the time of writing, the popular DApp saw a 24-hour volume of $156,614 across 1765 transactions.

State of DAPPS #3: Opensea

Opensea is a marketplace for crypto-based collectibles. It was founded in 2017 and currently has over 10 million items for sale across 300+ categories. They create customized storefronts in partnership with game developers where users can automatically purchase and sell their crypto collectibles. 

Ethereum and the ERC721 standard form the core part of Opensea's vision as they believe that both Ethereum & ERC721 will create an economy where the users will be the true owners of digital items. They think that these new economies will be supported by liquid marketplaces like Opensea. 

Opensea is funded by some of the biggest venture capital companies in the world like Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Founders Fund, YCombinator, and Blockstack. Currently, they have 17977 users and have seen 337,977 transactions worth $11,875,445.76 so far. 

State of DApps #4: Gnosis

Gnosis is a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum network. Their platform includes the prediction market, Dutch Exchange, and a multisig wallet. However, the team behind Gnosis is aiming more than just building a prediction market. They are aiming to create an entire ecosystem that will enable any user to create a prediction market application of their own.

The basic idea behind the prediction market platform of Gnosis is that a blockchain will allow users to trade cryptocurrencies that represent a future event outcome in the open market. As the outcomes of the event become clearer with time, the value of Gnosis tokens will increase or decrease depending upon the prediction of the user. 

There are two cryptocurrencies that are being used in the Gnosis software and these are GNO & OWL. Both of cryptocurrencies ensure that the transactions on the Gnosis platform are distributed and reliable. Gnosis is currently seeing lots of growth and has met all its ambitious goals so far. However, it is facing some competition from Augur (REP). The current market cap of Gnosis is $30,237,349 and there are 1,104,590 GNO in circulation now. 

State of DApps #5: Synthetix

Do you want to create off-chain synths that represent the valuable assets that exist in the real world? Look no further, Synthetix is your friend for this exact purpose. There are many examples available that perfectly sums up the use cases of Synthetix. You will find sUSD in Synthetix and it tracks the value of USD in the real world. Then, there is sXAU which tracks the real-world value of gold.

The underlying concept behind Synthetix is that a user can trade an asset without actually holding it physically. Synthetix's concept appeals to the traders who are interested in the trading of metals without holding any physical stock of it. 

There are several drawbacks of holding the physical stock of trading assets as the trader will require a physical space to store the assets. This will be an additional burden on the traders as they will have to pay for the storage and thus, this will decrease the profits that the traders earn from trading. Therefore, the concept of trading a digital equivalent of the real-world physical assets seems very attractive to the traders. Currently, they have 26,948 users and have seen 163,690 transactions so far. 

Conclusion 

Decentralized applications are seeing lots of traction for a year or so. We expect a decentralized application industry to maintain its growth momentum even in the future. However, there is a big issue that decentralized applications need to solve and this issue is about user retention. 

As per a report by Dapp.com, only 348K old DApp users still remained active in 2019. Moving forward, DApp creators must aim to solve the issue of low user retention to ensure long term growth of the industry.