Juergen Hoebarth on DApps: “The Blockchain Space is a Total Mess”

From October 30th to November 1st, hundreds of blockchain professionals from industry and academia are joining forces in Athens, Greece at Decentralized 2019 to engage in workshops, talks, and networking. One prominent keynote speaker was Juergen Hoebarth from Tokenization Limited, whose talk was titled Why DApps Still Have a Long Way to Go Before Mass Adoption.
Hoebarth started his talk with the background of mobile phones and the parallels to blockchain:
“In 2008, if you had a mobile phone you basically could just have a phone call and send SMS. What appeared around then was a basic way to start making mobile applications.
10 years later, the market cleared up and had standards to build on: Android and iOS.
Now, the blockchain space is a total mess. But great things take time. It took 10 years to figure out mobile apps.”
Basically, things like mobile apps took a long time, and we can’t expect DApps to reach mass adoption overnight:
“DApps are theoretically in the space for less than 2 years. By DApps, I mean consumer-facing decentralized applications.
There is no official term for DApp, for me, I think we should differentiate how apps are built. DApps should not have a different user interface, but now they’re completely different.
The core business logic of the app should be written in a smart contract and is interlinked with the blockchain, while in a centralized app functions are built on a centralized server.”
Essentially, DApps shouldn’t look different from apps, but they do look very different.
“If you look into the public blockchain space, there are 3 blockchains: Ethereum, EOS, and Tron, where most DApps are built upon.
How many monthly users does MetaMask have? Only 200,000 unique users per month. MetaMask is the tool to work with DApps. Today only around 250 people are using CryptoKitties. Mostly DApps are popular in DeFi. There’s not really anything useful built on it like a social network.
On EOS it’s all about gambling. On Tron, it’s the same story. It’s a bit of a gambling blockchain. It’s not really Chinese although people think it is, technically it’s incorporated in Singapore.
The Internet started with two industries, one of which was gambling.”
So, there aren’t actually many real-world DApp users, but they’ll come over time. One problem now is UX, but that should be overcome in the next 5 years:
“Currently, to use a DApp you need a specific plugin for each blockchain you’d like to interact with, like MetaMask. Developers don’t care about usability or UX. In the early days of computers, an app was built in MS-DOS and wasn’t usable for an average user — my parents, my sister, my cousin.
Most DApps try to overly decentralize. In Augur, everything is decentralized. You need consensus, and that takes a lot of time.
‘Decentralized’ is not a sales argument, no one cares if you’re hosted on AWS. DApps will reach mass adoption in around 5 years, because adoption cycles are always getting shorter.”
