Dapp (Decentralized Application), that is, decentralized application, is the most important part of the large-scale implementation of blockchain technology, and it is also an important indicator for evaluating the use of a public chain and infrastructure. Providers with valuable insights and analysis of industry trends. We have compiled this year's observation and thinking into this "2019 Blockchain Application Market Report". This annual report will focus on the following aspects:

• The development status of each public chain Dapp ecology

• Observation and analysis of DeFi, NFT, blockchain games and other hot spots

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Annual overview

In 2019, the entire Dapp industry continued to flourish. DappReview added 1,955 Dapps throughout the year, bringing the total number of Dapps to 4,087, and the total transaction volume on the chain for the year reached 23.6 billion US dollars. In terms of user scale, although it is far from being comparable to centralized applications, if compared vertically, the Dapp industry has gained a certain amount of incremental users. More and more teams and individuals have entered the game, which has also brought new blood to the industry. Over the past year, a series of breakthrough innovations have emerged in the Dapp industry in the fields of finance, NFT, and games.

As the first smart contract platform for large-scale application, Ethereum's leading position in the Dapp field is still difficult to shake. In 2018, Tron and EOS, which launched their mainnets one after another, also maintained a good momentum of development. At present, the transaction volume of these three public chains accounts for more than 98.55% of the Dapp market, forming an oligopoly situation. Beginning in 2019, a series of newly launched public chains have successively made efforts to develop the Dapp ecology. In addition to Ethereum, TRON, and EOS, DappReview also tracked another 9 public chains, which contributed a total of 354 Dapps.

This report will focus on the three major Dapp ecosystems of Ethereum, Tron, and EOS. The rest of the public chains are relatively less focused, and strive to highlight the key points.

Ethereum

Ethereum

Ethereum has the most diversified Dapp ecosystem and has always been the preferred Dapp development platform for developers. Of the 2,146 Ethereum Dapps included in DappReview, 1,223 are still active in 2019.

From the perspective of Dapp category distribution and daily active user distribution, Ethereum fully demonstrates its ecological diversity. Among them, game users are the most, accounting for 46.5%, and the number of decentralized exchange (trading) users is second, accounting for 20.9%. Risk Dapps are special because the number of players is not stable. With the rise and collapse of Dapps, there will be violent fluctuations in a short period of time. Take Fairwin as an example. During the active period of the project, more than 3,000 players participated every day. After the crash, the number of users was only single digits. In addition, its game mechanism also led to a sharp increase in Ethereum Gas Fee, which indirectly affected the number of active users of other Dapps. The decline in the number of Ethereum users in September was caused by Fairwin. Although the number of users of financial Dapps is small, the value of each transaction is very high.

In 2019, the total transaction volume of Ethereum was about 12.8 billion US dollars, and the transaction volume of DeFi type (transaction + finance) applications accounted for more than 90%. Among them, trading Dapps and financial Dapps contributed 61.05% and 29.98% of the transaction volume respectively.

game

game

For a long time, games have been regarded as one of the best landing scenarios of blockchain. Since the success of CryptoKitties, more and more developers and game teams have entered the market, trying to make more interesting attempts in the game sector. In 2019, many excellent blockchain game teams have won the favor of capital:

Most of the teams use Ethereum as the main position for blockchain game development. How should games be combined with blockchain? The answers given by development teams vary. Some teams choose to put the gameplay mechanism of the game on the chain and interact with users in the form of smart contracts, such as CryptoKitties, Axie Infinity, MyCryptoHero, etc. Under this scheme, limited by the performance of Ethereum and the threshold of the blockchain, compared with traditional games, the user experience is poor, and only users who are familiar with the blockchain can easily get started. In order to ensure the smooth experience of the game, other game teams usually only put the assets in the game on the chain in the form of NFT (Non-Fungible Token, non-homogeneous token), and put all the core gameplay of the game off the chain. Such as Gods Unchained, SkyWeaver, etc.

In November last year, GodsUnchained, which had been pre-sold for more than a year, finally issued the ERC-721 tokens of the cards to players, and then opened the card trading market. By the end of the year, a total of 203,000 card transactions occurred, with a transaction volume of US$1.03 million. The first two weeks of card trading were the peak trading period, and then began to decline, and did not pick up until the end of December. Two mythical cards Atlas and Prometheus were auctioned on Opensea at prices of 210ETH and 235ETH on December 8th and December 10th respectively.

After more than a year of development, the overall quality of blockchain games has improved significantly. The most direct manifestation is that there are more and more cross-platform games. In 2018, almost all Dapps only had web versions, and in 2019, game Dapps that launched native mobile programs began to increase. There are also many teams that have launched computer client versions, and blockchain games represented by Light Trail Rush have even logged into the Steam gaming platform.

Most of the web-based blockchain games are limited to role-playing, card, collection and other types, while the types of blockchain games on mobile and computer terminals are more abundant, including first-person shooting, real-time strategy, role-playing, and massively multiplayer online games. , racing, fighting and other game types. Compared with browser games, client games have obvious advantages, such as fast speed, high-quality graphics, and diverse gameplay. In the future, end games integrating blockchain will be the general trend, and we are likely to witness the launch of a AAA blockchain game within a few years.

NFT

Games such as CryptoKitties and Gods Unchained use NFTs issued based on the ERC-721 standard. On June 18 last year, ERC-1155 proposed by Enjin officially became the official token standard of Ethereum. The standard has many new features and is more suitable for game props in design. For example, users can package multiple Tokens and send multiple Tokens to one or more recipients with only one transaction, which can effectively reduce Gas costs. A more interesting mechanism is that when casting NFT (or FT), ENJ tokens can be pledged to inject intrinsic value (or production cost) into NFT. ENJ tokens are equivalent to raw materials, just like we forge a knife, Also inseparable from metal.

DappReview believes that the core value of NFT comes from the value of its usage scenarios and the premium brought by brand endorsement. The many advantages given to NFT by the blockchain, such as non-tampering, true ownership, etc., are just inherent attributes of NFT.

The value of NFT = intrinsic value + usage scenario value + brand premium + blockchain empowerment value

At present, there are more than 48 million FT and NFT minted using ENJ, and a total of more than 9 million ENJ tokens (worth 700,000 US dollars) have been locked.

It is worth mentioning that in December last year, Binance issued a series of limited collection NFTs based on ERC-1155, which became the most actively traded assets in one fell swoop. The locked ENJ tokens of these NFTs are only 0.5 ENJ, but the average transaction price is between 100-200 US dollars, and the highest even reaches 20,000 ENJ (about 1570 US dollars). strong price support.

High Risk - Fairwin

High-risk Dapps have always been a sensitive topic in the industry, including various types of funds. But we must admit that this category of Dapp has always maintained a high user engagement rate, where players dance with greed and fear. Taking Fairwin as an example, this is an obvious Ponzi scheme. However, before its collapse, a total of 19,208 addresses participated in the game, with a total transaction volume of more than 690,000 ETH, and contributed nearly 9,000 ETH in Gas Fee to Ethereum.

The purpose of most users participating in Fairwin is to speculate and try to earn more tokens, but what is the actual result?

• 8,316 addresses have positive returns, with an average rate of return of 12.94%, earning an average of 8.32ETH
  

• 10,129 addresses have negative income, with an average yield of -47.59%, and an average loss of 9.57ETH

• 763 addresses have no loss and no profit, just to recover the principal

The developer of the project charged a 4% handling fee and made a total profit of 27,785ETH.

DeFi

This section is contributed by Binance Research (Etienne), which began outputting a series of comprehensive and insightful reports on decentralized finance (“DeFi Series”) last June.

The following is from the third report, discussing recent developments and key narratives in the DeFi space. For the full version of the report, read Binance Research's report.

https://research.binance.com/

DeFi includes (decentralized) transaction services and financial applications such as lending marketplaces, asset management services and payment solutions.

In 2019, the price of ETH fluctuated between $100 and $350, with a median price of $173. To date, most decentralized finance ecosystems are built on top of Ethereum, regardless of its price.

The graph represents all on-chain activity, which may include some exchanges that are not fully decentralized (such as IDEX). As the graph above shows, more than 90% of all on-chain transaction volume of Ethereum-based Dapps comes from DeFi-related applications: From a user perspective, DeFi has been a growth driver for Ethereum in 2019.

In short, Ethereum and DeFi have become "two-headed monsters", leading the pace of further development of each.

Although DeFi represents only a small part of the crypto industry, it is one of the most dynamic areas in it.

In 2019, there were 3,456 daily unique users on Ethereum-based DeFi platforms.

The number of active projects (defined as those with 50+ unique users per day) nearly doubled in 2019. However, the absolute number remains small, with fewer than 20 projects.

Furthermore, within the crypto world, DeFi is still very small. For example, the total value of collateral locked in staking products is much higher at about $6 billion, more than five times higher than the total value of collateral in DeFi.

Finally, the size of DeFi is still negligible compared to the (traditional) fixed income market. The most recent estimate of the total size of the debt market in 2019 was about $250 trillion. In the U.S. alone, consumer lending in 2019 is estimated to be around $1.6 trillion.

In 2020, we expect that DeFi on the Ethereum platform will have the following trends:

• Maker’s dominance will end: We expect Compound to have a chance to overtake Maker in terms of transaction volume and locked value. Synthetix also has the potential to challenge Maker due to its flexibility in synthesizing assets. But Synthetix also has hidden dangers, that is, the liquidity of its core collateral SNX is worrying. In contrast, Maker's collateral (ETH and BAT) has better liquidity.

• Maker’s DSR integration: While MakerDAO’s dominance may be challenged, it will remain a mainstay in the DeFi space. After a major update at the end of the year, Maker brought DSR (Dai Savings Rate) integration and multi-collateral Dai, ETH and BAT became the first mortgage assets of multi-collateral Dai. At the same time, DSR may become one of the most important interest rates in the DeFi field. For example, Fulcrum has integrated DSR into its platform, and exchanges that support Dai trading pairs will also integrate this rate into their own platforms.

• Lending solutions beyond overcollateralization: As we mentioned in our first DeFi report, overcollateralization does not help the unbanked. So we are exploring some early solutions other than overcollateralization, including: social fund recovery, credit scoring system, zero-knowledge proof, credit market DAO, etc. We also expect that one day DeFi projects can be like credit cards, allowing users to pledge future cash flow as a promise to borrow. Sablier, an experiment on Ethereum using smart contracts to automatically pay salaries, could pave the way for a dedicated protocol for this. At the beginning of 2020, Aave (LEND) will migrate its lending market to the main network, and launch a new loan product that does not require over-collateralization - Flash Loans.

• More DeFi derivatives will be born on the Ethereum mainnet: the Convexity protocol and some other platforms (such as the UMA protocol) will bring more trading opportunities to the DeFi field. But from the perspective of option underwriters, many people are also worried about risk control and rewards. Not to mention that there are synthetic assets like SwanDai that track the price deviation between DAI and the anchor price (one dollar) in an index form, and they will also be launched on the main network.

• USDT: With the large-scale migration of USDT to the Ethereum platform, it can be expected that USDT will also be integrated into various DeFi in the near future. In Compound's "Next Supported Currency" voting, USDT has already appeared.

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wave field

"Las Vegas on the blockchain" is the most appropriate way to describe the TRON Dapp ecosystem in 2019. Eight of the top ten TRON Dapps by transaction volume are lottery Dapps. In 2019, the total transaction volume of TRON Dapps was US$4.4 billion, of which lottery Dapps contributed US$3.99 billion. No matter in terms of turnover, gameplay or game experience, the lottery Dapp on TRON has formed a tendency to crush other chains.

From the number of active Dapps in different categories, it can be seen that risk and lottery Dapps account for a high proportion. In terms of the number of users, an average of 60.81% of users use lottery Dapps every day. Most lottery Dapps will issue dividend tokens (discussed later), these tokens are mainly traded on decentralized exchanges, which to a certain extent also drives the growth of trading Dapp users. The average daily active users of trading Dapps accounted for 10.93%. The development momentum of game Dapps is relatively slow, and the number of daily active users has gradually decreased since the second half of the year, accounting for only 11.36%. There were two outbreaks of high-risk Dapps on the TRON platform, one was from March to April, when a large number of high-risk Dapps appeared during this period, and the other was in the fourth quarter, when the launch of Tronhive set off another wave orgasm.

In terms of transaction volume, lottery Dapp once again demonstrated its dominance, accounting for 90.39%. Trading Dapps accounted for 8.27%.

Sweepstakes and Bonus Tokens

Wink is the most successful and profitable lottery Dapp in 2019, with an annual transaction volume of US$2.8 billion. On the Wink platform, games such as Live and Poker are not decentralized games based on smart contracts. The data on the chain can only count the deposits and withdrawals of users using cryptocurrency, and the betting amount is not included in the statistics. Therefore, its actual cumulative betting amount is much higher than this figure.

TRONbet is the predecessor of Wink. It completed its brand upgrade when it was listed on Binance for IEO in July last year. The original game mining token ANTE was also upgraded to WIN token. In the 9 months before the IEO, TRONbet’s dividends to users have reached 1.7 billion TRON, and the cumulative transaction volume has exceeded 100 billion TRON, which is equivalent to the total token supply of the TRON platform.

Next, let’s discuss a little bit about the dividend tokens of lottery Dapps. Many lottery Dapps airdrop tokens to players in the form of "game is mining". The number of tokens obtained is often determined by the player's betting amount, such as 1 game token for every 100 TRX bet. By holding and locking these tokens, users will get the right to dividends, that is, the lottery platform will regularly distribute part of its profits to all token holders.

This design has attracted many non-lottery users to earn income by "mining" game tokens. Each lottery mining token has a certain mining cost:

Theoretical mining cost = betting amount * bookmaker advantage / number of mined tokens

User dividend amount = platform income * dividend ratio / total lock-up tokens * number of user lock-ups

From the perspective of mathematical expectation, users continue to bet according to the same betting amount, as long as the number of times is sufficient, the mining cost will gradually approach the theoretical mining cost. The amount of dividends will vary with the income of the platform. As more and more tokens are mined, everyone's dividend share will also be diluted.

Token economic design has always played an important role in the blockchain, and the same is true for lottery Dapps. Due to the unreasonable lock-up design, 888TRON suffered a cliff-like collapse after creating an astonishing record of 3.6 billion Trx transaction volume in a single day (about 82 million US dollars, which is also the highest single-day transaction volume in Dapp history) on March 16 last year. Its core design flaw is that there is no token unfreezing time, that is, users can mortgage tokens to participate in dividends at any time, and unfreeze tokens at any time.

Smart speculators discovered the arbitrage space, bought tokens from the secondary market for pledge before the dividend time, and quickly thawed and sold the tokens after receiving dividends. A large number of selling orders in a short period of time make the price of tokens in the secondary market far lower than the cost of mining. For miners, it is better to buy tokens directly than to mine. And if no one plays game mining, the dividends will be difficult to maintain, so that the game tokens are no longer attractive, and the entire game economic mechanism collapses rapidly.

However, the Russian team did not give up. By optimizing the game mechanism, introducing new games, redesigning the UI and a series of promotional activities, it took half a year to gradually revitalize the game, which is really rare.

In the second half of last year, high-quality lottery Dapps on the TRON platform emerged in an endless stream. Many traditional centralized lottery platforms began to test the waters of blockchain lottery, and TRON was the first choice. The new generation of lottery Dapp represented by Betfury and RocketGame has won the first place in the lottery list for many times.

TRON ecological layout

There has always been a lot of criticism about TRON and its founder, Justin Sun. Unlike Ethereum, which is a technology-driven public chain, TRON is more like a marketing and business-driven public chain.

Justin Sun is very aggressive in acquisition and ecological layout. After the successful acquisition of Bittorrent in 2018, the layout will continue in 2019:

• The TRC20-based USD stablecoin USDT was launched in April last year, and 916 million USDT has been issued so far. In contrast, ERC-USDT was issued about 16 months earlier than TRC-USDT, and the current total circulation is about 2.29 billion.

• Invest in Biscuit, the leading blockchain game EOS Knights development team in the EOS ecosystem. The team's new game Knight Story will no longer support EOS, but will be launched on Ethereum, Tron and Klaytn.

• Invest in Poloniex and integrate its decentralized exchange TRX.Market under the Poloniex brand.

• The built-in wallet of Samsung's blockchain mobile phone has added support for Tron.

• Acquired the decentralized live broadcast platform Dlive.

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EOS

The performance of EOS throughout 2019 can be said to be "opening high and going low".

At the beginning of 2019, the popularity of lottery Dapps on EOS was the same for a while, and it was therefore "favored" by the majority of hackers. According to the statistics of Chengdu Lianan, as of the beginning of December 2019, there have been more than 60 typical attacks on the EOS public chain, and the cumulative loss has reached hundreds of thousands of EOS. The first quarter is a concentrated outbreak period, mainly due to the security of the Dapp contract code. Weakness, coupled with the continued popularity of lottery applications on the EOS public chain during this period, led hackers to continuously attack the same vulnerability on multiple Dapps, mainly through transaction blocking, rollback transaction attacks, counterfeit currency attacks, random number cracking, etc. .

By the last quarter of 2019, EIDOS almost paralyzed the entire EOS network by itself after it went online on November 1. EIDOS is an airdrop token contract. Users only need to initiate a transfer of any amount (minimum amount 0.0001EOS) to the contract to receive an airdrop reward. Under this mechanism, a large number of users frantically initiate transactions to EIDOS, earning EIDOS tokens at almost no cost. Some large households rent huge resources and call multiple accounts to initiate transactions through scripts. Some wallets and exchanges even launch "EIDOS "Mining machine" is exclusively for users to collect wool.

After the launch of EIDOS, an average of 1.69 million transactions were generated every day, accounting for 50.64% of the transactions on the entire main network, which directly led to a surge in the price of resources on the EOS main network. If a user wants to initiate an ordinary token transfer, he must first mortgage 30EOS to obtain resources. This is undoubtedly an irony for EOS, which once advertised zero transaction fees.

Mainnet congestion has seriously affected the user experience of other Dapps. Even under the new features of EOS1.8, the Dapp team can pay the resource fee for the user, but this is of no avail, because most teams cannot afford the high network fee. A number of leading Dapps have left the EOS platform one after another, including EOSKnight, the blockchain game with the largest number of users, and EOSBet, a popular lottery Dapp for EOS veterans. EOSBet issued a statement in November last year, announcing that it would upgrade its brand to EarnBet. At the same time, the team expressed their dismay at the state of the EOS mainnet. They believed that this was neither a problem with the algorithm of REX nor a problem with smart contracts, but a problem with the governance of EOS.

In terms of the number of average daily users, the lottery category and other types of Dapps have always been hard to distinguish, each accounting for about 40%. Other categories include the once popular Dapp Hashbaby and many tool applications. However, after November, with the launch of EIDOS, the average daily users of these two categories of Dapps dropped sharply, and were overtaken by game Dapps with stable performance throughout the year at the end of December. This is because there are a large number of robot accounts and wool accounts in lottery and other types of Dapps. As EIDOS caused the congestion of the entire network, the cost of using these accounts increased significantly, making it difficult to continue the brushing behavior. Most game Dapp users are real players. In order to cope with network congestion, some game Dapps began to pay resource fees for players to ensure their normal use.

game

game

In 2019, many excellent game Dapps emerged in the EOS ecosystem, most of which are based on native mobile apps. These games will call the blockchain wallet application through depplink to complete the transaction signature. If the game involves frequent interactions on the chain, it will jump back and forth between the two applications, and the user experience will be greatly reduced. However, the picture improvement brought by the native App is far better than that of H5 web games, and the fluency and operating experience of the game are also more friendly than Dapp browsers. Unfortunately, due to the review policies of the App Store and Google Play, most blockchain-based native apps are difficult to pass the review and cannot be distributed in the app store.

In the EOS ecosystem, there are many blockchain games with more than 1,000 daily activities, such as EOS Knights, EOS Three Kingdoms, Prospectors, etc. As the first real game Dapp on the EOS mainnet, EOS Knights created nearly 7,000 DAU at its peak in early 2019. EOS Three Kingdoms borrowed from the gameplay of EOS Knights, added on-chain tokens to enhance user participation, and effectively controlled inflation through numerical design in the game. It came from behind and became the game Dapp with the most active users in the second half of last year.

However, these excellent blockchain games still have to face a cruel reality: the EIDOS airdrop will continue for 15 months, the congestion of the EOS main network may be difficult to solve in the short term, and the stock users are gradually losing, and there are no new users. How will Block.one break the predicament?

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IOST

IOST is a high-performance public chain based on the PoB (Proof of Confidence) consensus mechanism. The main network was launched on February 25, 2019. Up to now, 43 Dapps have been launched on the IOST mainnet, among which games and lottery are the most important types.

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STEEM

Steem is a high tps public chain. The underlying structure is the same as that of BitShares, and it also uses graphene technology. In 2019, the most popular Dapps on the platform were Steemit and Steem Monster.

Steemit is a decentralized content platform. As the first Dapp on Steem, it has always had many loyal users. However, judging from the data, the number of its users showed a downward trend in 2019, with 5,000 daily active users at the beginning of the year and only 2,000 by the end of the year.

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NEO

NEO is an open network built for the smart economy and one of the earliest public chains, founded in 2017. In 2019, NEO began to develop the Dapp ecosystem. In just a few months, many excellent blockchain games joined the NEO ecosystem to expand users, including Blockchain Cuties, NeoFish and Monster World.

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ONT

ONT Ontology Network is a new generation of public basic chain & distributed trust collaboration platform. The main network was launched on June 30, 2018. As of now, 55 Dapps are running on ONT, 31 of which are game Dapps.

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LOOM

LOOM Network is a multi-chain interoperability platform that was launched in early 2018.

There are 16 Dapps on LOOM Network, and CryptoZombies, as the most representative Dapp on LOOM, has been relatively stable. Since it was launched on the chain in August last year, it basically relied on its own strength to support the overall data of the whole chain in the second half of the year. The card game Zombies Battlegrounds (later renamed Retentless), which raised $321,000 on Kickstarter and had high hopes, suffered a difficult birth after a year and a half of development. The main person in charge of the game has left, and the entire project will be open source. Give it back to the community.

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TOMO

TomoChain provides a solution to the scalability problem of the Ethereum platform.

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WICC

WICC WaykiChain is a Turing-complete smart contract platform.

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WAVES

As an open application platform for Web 3.0, Waves main network has launched 24 Dapps, mainly lottery Dapps.

The most traded Dapp on Waves is Dice Roller. In August 2019, the Waves team released the decentralized platform DappOcean to encourage developers to create Dapp programs. At present, the DappOcean platform has released a variety of lottery Dapps including Dice Roller, Ride on Waves, and Coin Flip.

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WAX

WAX Global Asset Exchange (Worldwide Asset Exchange) is a public chain that was born after being customized based on EOSIO code and heavily modified according to its own needs.

The substantial increase in the number of active users of WAX at the end of the year came from Prospectors. This game was released on EOS in June and landed on the WAX ​​platform at the end of the year. As a public chain whose mainnet was only launched in the second half of 2019, there are already 26 Dapps. We look forward to the performance of WAX in 2020.