Dapp Data Insight: Volume down 60%, Did Dapps die?
This arcticle is written by Vincent Niu, and first published on DappReview Wechat Channel on Feb.15th 2019. The following is edited and translated by Mable Jiang @ Nirvana Capital
Over the Chinese New Year, we’ve been hearing from friends and investors about the downward-moving Dapp stastistics.
“Did Dapps die?”
This may have not yet been the ultimate question.
“Was my cost a sunk one?” is.
To answer these questions from friends , we put together this straightforward piece — not much interpretation; with the data, you’ll know what you know.
Most data tracking sites, including DappReview, count the number of users of a Dapp as the number that interacted with smart contract addresses. In other words, if 1000 different addresses initiate transactions to a Dapp, the Dapp has 1000 active users that day.
Using the logic above, we took a look at the user statistics in the past two months. Here’s how the chart look like:
From this perspective, Dapp is actually doing quite fine — the number of users has been growing.
Secondly, transaction volume:
That’s right, you’re not seeing it wrong. During the Chinese New Year, daily transaction volume went down for 60%-70%, compared to December.
So what’s the problem here — why did the total transaction volume went down, while total number of users were still growing?
- Dapp mining is not lucrative enough, so the major miners gradually stopped their high frequency mining, and these two factors mutually reinforce each other to bring the total transaction volume down
- The attention on Dapps from the mainstream investors and the crypto community has gradually dropped from the peak in November. Although new users keep coming in, the retention rate is not so high given the lack of high-quality content. With that being said, while the number of users has been increasing, it helps neither the transaction volume nor the DAU
- A considerable number of Dapps make up the user volumes by faking the interaction times; when people are paying less attention to the statistics, correspondingly those Dapps are less incentivized to fake the user volumes
- One last straightforward fact: it’s Chinese New Year! A significant number of Chinese users are simply turning off
To get a better understanding of the authentic active users, let’s look at a few other dimensions to filter out these “active users”
EOS
We first screen the users by number of transactions and have the following:
in this chart, we have segmented the users by 2+, 3+, 5+, and 10+ times of daily transactions. We could see that the activeness of users that are 2+ and 3+ txns is rather volatile, whereas the number of users that have 5+ daily transactions stay around 10k-11k, and the number for 10+ daily transactions stay at 7k-8k.
We have also broken down the transaction volumes:
In this chart, we segmented users by transaction amount 1+, 2+, 5+, and 10+ EOS. All 4 categories have shown downward trend. For example, users with transaction amount >1 EOS have slided down from 5k to 3.3k, especially given that the majority of EOS holders are in China (again, CNY!). According to the Google Analytics of DappReview, the number of visits to EOS related page has dropped 63%, versus the number to TRON (which has a lot more non-Chinese users) has only down by 18%.
Between the 2 approaches, DappReview is more prone to use transaction volume >1 EOS as the threshold for authentic active users.
TRON
With the same criteria, we have derive the following 2 charts for TRON:
The number of users that have 5+ transactions per day is stable around 7–8k, and 10+ at 3-4k.
In short, TRON has been relatively stable. The number of users that have daily transaction amount >100 TRX stays at 6k, not much volatility in the past month.
ETH
For an average crypto community member (not an ETH enthusiastic), ETH is really not that much ahead any more. Some people even think the good days for ETH have long gone after EOS and then TRON exploded in the latter half of 2018. Yet, statistically speaking, ETH ecosystem is really not doing so bad.
Given the limit of TPS, the average number of users that have 5 transactions is around 1.2k, 10 transactions around 600. So from this end, the statistics indeed do not look good compared to EOS and TRON.
Yet it seems to have gotten it back from the transaction volume. The data has been lacking volatility — all segments are between 2–3k. How about the number of users that are active by high number of transaction times? Don’t forget that the high Gas to some extent has prevented people from making one single transaction too small.
Another interesting group of numbers. In the past 2 months, the number of addresses that had smart contract interaction for each chain is following:
EOS: 197K
ETH: 151K
TRON: 267K
The number of active addresses (users):
EOS : 13845 — criteria for “active user“: txns 60+, volume 60+EOS
ETH : 2133 —criteria for “active user“: txns 60+, volume 1.5+ETH
TRON : 16236 — criteria for “active user“: txns 60+, volume 6000+TRX
If we look with the same lens but set the time back to October and November, EOS came way stronger than TRON.
What happened afterwards?
Mining-style gambling started from EOS in October, reached its peak in November, and started to die out since December. The whole process was expedited by miners and mining machines.
TRON shares a similar gameplay, starting from November, and started to reach its peak in December and January this year (especially given TRONbet, the strong head of TRON Dapps). Compared to EOS, TRON has significantly fewer miners and mining machines. As a result, it takes longer for Dapps on TRON to die out.
Honestly, the performance of Dapps on three chains have not differentiate much from each other. Regardless whether it’s EOS, TRON, or ETH, the top 1000 addresses have all contributed 80%+ total transaction volumes; the rest 100k+ addresses share the rest (less than 20%)
If we review the statistics for the three chains in the past two months, we could come to the followings:
1. Since everybody may have a different definition for “users”, from our own rules defined above and data captured, we believe the authentic number of user is somewhere between 2k and 6k
2. In terms of the statistics, EOS and TRON have been slightly above ETH. The renewal of EOS Dapps has been the fastest (with all the Chinese people)
3. Right now the Dapp world is at a vacuum stage that calls for another innovative / mind-blown mechanism / gameplay
Dapp did not die; instead it’s just another inevitable downward cycle, not just Dapps themselves but also the no-more-novel gambling gameplay and the bored miners. High quality content and value-adding gameplay is still scarce — but before Dapps locate it the community will continue to experience such ups and downs.
More Readings —
About DappReview:
DappReview is the largest Dapp platform in the world, tracking data of 6 public chains, with more than 2500 Dapps data. We are delivering accurate DApp data, user insights and market analytics.
As one of the leading media dedicated to blockchain technology and DApps, DappReview provides professional reviews on new DApps and industry insights. Most of our articles are in Chinese, but we will translate the featured ones and publish on Medium.
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About Nirvana Capital
Nirvana Capital is a San Francisco/Beijing based blockchain fund that focuses on primary market investment and exploration in edging ideas of technology and economics. Its founding partners are also early supporters of Ethereum. To bring together ecosystems that revolutionize the social productions and labor relations with the communities underneath, Nirvana Capital provides end-to-end strong support to its portfolio projects, including advisory on strategies/operations and resources matching.
