Why DappRadar is stamping down on deceptive and manipulated traffic data
During the past couple of months, there’s been a growing debate about how to measure dapp performance to ensure rankings are fair and accurate.
Although it’s early days for the industry, we strongly believe in building a service that will highlight the best dapps, and this means DappRadar is committed to only measuring and recording what we consider to be genuine user traffic.
In this context, we’ve been surprised and disappointed to see other companies promoting clearly manipulated data. This is not how we want the dapp ecosystem to evolve. Transparency and a level playing field remain our #1 goal.
Instead of debating the legitimacy of artificial traffic we rather have a debate about the right metrics. This is certainly a topic where the industry can evolve and additional data needs to be looked at. More about this in future posts.
Currently, we see dapp data being actively and passively manipulated in three main ways:
- Activity is actively manipulated by a dapp boosting service to ensure dapps remain high in rankings. This is typically driven by the developer themselves.
- Dapps contain incentives that encourage players to create multiple wallets and accumulate rewards and tokens. This may be active manipulation by the developer or a byproduct of design.
- The trading of dapp tokens on exchanges is included in overall traffic data.
DappRadar has started filtering its results to remove such activity and will continue to monitor future developments, and take swift action when required to ensure our data is as accurate as possible.
This may include marking dapps we believe are engaging in manipulative and deceptive activities, potentially even blocking or delisting dapps from our site that continue to do so.
Certainly, there will always be incentives for companies to inflate their dapps’ performance. Trying to game the system is inherent in all sectors, and despite the relative openness of blockchain data, it will continue to happen here too.
But we want our industry to be as transparent and truthful as possible so the rewards of what we are sure will be a vibrant and profitable ecosystem go to the best products, not those that are best at gaming the system.
Infographic vector in the header image created by pikisuperstar — www.freepik.com
