An Overview of Blockchain Projects with DApps

8 min readApr 10, 2019

An Overview of Blockchain Projects with DApps

Executive Summary

Projects analyzed in this report are: ETH, ADA, EOS, Tron, NEO and Ontology by mainly focusing on project operations. These projects have relatively higher rankings on CoinMarketCap with enough exposure to publics. DApps were also developed on these mainnets which could be further analyzed through DApp portals. The report will analyze these projects from different aspects: project overview, development, marketing strategies/ tactics, commercialization (mainly B2C business).

Viewing the difference of relationship between official teams and communities, the report adopted a categorization by using the term “centralized autonomous system” and a rather “decentralized autonomous system”.

Table of Content

Part 1 Group 1 Projects Analysis (ETH, EOS, ADA)

1.An Overview of Mainnet Status

2.Economic Model Analysis on Group 1

3.Technical Analysis on Group 1

(1)Key features comparison

(2)Consensus and Scalability

(3)Development Progress of Group 1

(4)Development tools of Group 1 Projects

4.Market and Popularity Analysis on Group 1

Part 2: Group 2 Projects Analysis (ONT, NEO, TRON)

1.Economic Model Analysis on Group 2

2.Technical Analysis on Group 2

(1)Key features comparison

(2)Consensus and Scalability

(3)Development Progress of Group 1

(4)Development tools of Group 1 Projects

3.Market and Popularity Analysis on Group 2

Part 1 Projects Overview

1.An Overview of Mainnet Status

This report categorized ETH, ADA and EOS as Group 1 for B2C business analysis as official teams have relatively lower engagement in community management and project operations.

Statistics below were collected from CoinMarketcap and blockchain explorers of each project which illustrates current status of each project.

2.Economic Model Analysis on Group 1

Ethereum does not have a community governance mechanism but ETH’s communities has good atmosphere and developers are active. ETH foundation is promoting the Casper project which is a PoS mechanism designed by Ethereum.

Facing challenges of other mainnet projects, EOS although is still the most exposed project, competitions between nodes are becoming more intense, polarization between numbers of resources (RAM, NET and CPU) of each holder is getting evident.

Cardano Foundation has three teams with difference responsibilities. The foundation was recently challenged by IOHK and Emugrgo teams as management of funds is still not transparent. Currently the divergence between teams is not solved. Cardano does not have communities as good as ETH and EOS but the project still benefited from huge number of members. ADA received higher recognition in Japan market.

3.Technical Analysis on Group 1

(1)Key features comparison

Key technical features mainly are: consensus mechanism, TPS, virtual machine, sacalability, coding languages and development tools.

(2)Consensus and Scalability

Ethereum initially adopted PoW and is transforming to PoS consensus since Casper. It is worth noting that, from the year 2018, many public chain projects are adopting PoS or similar consensus for better efficiency, and avoiding centralized mining pools and heavy energy consumption. Fees on average can be 21k Gas for per transaction and it takes 14–15s for per block production.

EOS is using DPoS consensus mechanism with BFT algorithm. Each super node creates consecutively 6 blocks, with a speed of 0.5s per block generation, and 1s for irreversible blocks. Graphene and cross-chain communications can be seen as core technical features of EOS.

Cardano’s Ouroboros algorithm is based on PoS consensus, which can be seen as direct competitor of Casper. The team indicated that they may have development on sharding but have not release specific plan for it. Cardano is composed of Cardano Settlement Layer (CSL) for distributed ledger,helping and Cardano Computational Layer (CCL) for allowing user-created functionality, assets, and projects to leverage the Cardano network. Fees on average can be 0.155381 ADA for per transaction and it takes 20s for per block production.

(3)Development Progress of Group 1

(4)Development tools of Group 1 Projects

a.Ethereum has diversified tools, most of which were developed by community developers.

Wallet:

MetaMask

IDEs:

Mix (Offiilal)

Truffle, DApple, LXAAl

APIs:

Web3 JavaScrip API, JSON PRC API

Ethereum console through IPC

Embedded services:

Swarm

Whispter

Other tools:

Solc (complier)

Solium (static code analyzer for Solidity)

ether.camp (based on Azure, Baas)

BlockApps (API)

Embark (development framework)

Zeppelin (library)

b.Major tools of EOS are as follows:

Wallet:

Scatter

API:

Smart contract API (C/C++)

RPC API

Wallet RPC API

Cleos Commands (cli utility)

Library:

Nodeos (Node)

Keosd (light-wallet)

eosio.cdt (Contract Dec Toolkit)

eosjs (Javascript library)

demux-js (State handler)

c.Cardano’s tools:

Cardano lists its tools in it document as settlement layer (SL), principle wallet of Cardano is Daedalus. Major tools including SDKs and APIs for smart contract and games development.

4.Market and Popularity Analysis on Group 1

By comparing key words searched by users, it is clear that EOS currently has the most popularity globally.

In general, there is an evident correlation between token price and popularity. Ethereum still has the most traffic, its traffic is also more stable than EOS. Cardano’s popularity saw a sharp decrease over the last year.

(1)Twitter Analysis of Group 1

Data of the following charts were quoted on each Twitter account on 7th April.

Ethereum’s official account mainly retweet posts of related projects and developers, 1 tweet per 2 days on average. Vitalik mainly expresses his ideas on blockchain and projects without pictures. Discussions can be retweeted.

EOS Community Forum mainly tweets quotes from Dan Larimer on Telegram, Block.one is in charge of official announcement release with articles shared from Medium. It also shares ideos of interviews and photos of events sometimes. Dan Larimer mainly interacts with KOLs and developers on Twitter.

Cardano mainly releases official announcement with low interactions with other KOLs and community. Charles Hoskinson doesn’t have all the posts related to Cardano project, topics shared can be various.

(2)Facebook Analysis of Group 1

a.Ethereum

Likes: 142,106

Followers: 152,299

Likes per post: 50–100

Comments per post: 30–50

Shares per post: 10–20

b.EOS

Likes: 13,183

Followers: 16,092

Likes per post: 5–20

Comments per post: 0–4

Shares per post: 2–3

c.Cardano

Likes: 21,850

Followers: 25,263

Likes per post: 5–20

Comments per post: 0–2

Shares per post: 0–1

Projects don’t have many distinguishments on their Facebook account. Projects have lower engagement and users are not very active on Facebook.

(3)Youtube Analysis of Group 1

a.Ethereum

Subscribe: 56K

Videos of DevCon and tools explainers. 500–1K views on average without many comments.

b.EOS.IO

Subscribe: 13K

Basic knowledge of blockchain technology and events records. Per video can get around 5K views. Comments are disabled.

c.Cardano

Subscribe: 4.5K

100–500 views on average. Topics are mainly about Cardano’s technology and product demos. There are also several comments in each video.

(4)Other Highlights of Group 1

EOS have established an account @block.one_official on Instagram which shows daily activities of the team. The account has over 59K followers with 100+ likes per post. EOS is also very popular on Medium, Block.one release its new posts every 2–3 days.

Ethereum is available on Meetup as the popularity of this project is high enough, offline events are held worldwide mainly in Western Europe, North America and East Asia.

(5)Conclusion

So far Ethereum still benefits from strong support from communities. The position of Ethereum is still irreplaceable by other projects. So far more than 160 companies joined EEA (Enterprise Ethereum Alliance) for further explorations on B2B business based on Ethereum.

Market’s interest in EOS fluctuates as direct competition is intense for EOS. However EOS well distributed its missions to super nodes and developers that makes the community have enormous contributions on this project. EOS is more famous for DApps instead of B2B business adoptions.

Cardano’s popularity keeps going down although price went up again recently. The project lacks of good marketing contents and has exposures on media. Only a few DApps were developed but with low use rate.

(6)Note

This report only focus on official social media accounts and does not have further analysis on Group 1 projects on Chinese social media as it is more recognized by the market that these 3 projects are rather internationalized and don’t have any official account neither official release in Chinese. Most contents in Chinese were generated by super nodes or developers which needs to be studied in different ways.

Part 2: Group 2 Projects Analysis (ONT, NEO, TRON)

(1)Key features comparison of Group 2

(2)Consensus and Scalability of Group 2

(3)Development Progress of Group 2

(4)Development tools of Group 2

For Group 2 projects which mainly focuses on DApps and are relatively more centralized on community management commercialization, most projects developed wallets, APIs, IDEs, SDKs etc.

3.Market and Popularity Analysis on Group 2