2018 ICO volume tripled that of 2017, but slowed down in the second half of the year
Although the market is still highly volatile at the end of the year, 2018 is considered a good growing year of blockchain in terms of technology improvement.
According to Coinschedule, in total, 1072 Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) with a total volume of more than $21.4 billion have been registered in 2018. In comparison, in 2017, there were a total of 453 ICOs with a volume of just over $6.5 billion. This showed that (ICOs) were the most sought way for fund raising despite the price collapse of cryptocurrencies. As more money is raised, bigger and better platforms and products will be built to disrupt many industries.
Despite the market volatility, decentralized applications built on Ethereum network grew strongly in number, and so forth, reinforcing Ethereum’s value at an exponential rate. Ethereum proved itself to be the most popular network for decentralized applications to be built upon, many of which have successfully raised funds for development.
As for the non-fungible-token (NFT) projects, the Ethereum Dapps ecosystem has grown from 3 major projects in early 2017 to a bigger one. So far, there have been 1372 Dapp projects listed on Dappradar.
We also see a less concentrated market of Dapps toward the end of 2018. According to Coingecko, 2018 is the year of gradual slowdown on the CryptoKitties marketplace after a huge spike in volume in 2017. Users have more options with more diverse gameplay, from Collectibles, to RPGs and Trading cards.
Though the craze of virtual kitties did not repeat anymore this year, high-quality projects gradually stand out as they invest more resources on building good features and active community.
Here is the current leading Dapp games on Ethereum. In terms of active users, Etheremon maintained the highest position throughout the second half of 2018, thanks to frequent feature updates and good commitment in community building.
The year of blockchain technology progressing
The second point we must mention is the change of decentralized applications technology over the past year. As we are still early in blockchain’s development, Dapp projects have tested out different approaches to drive user adoption.
We have already heard about significant benefits of blockchain, including greater transparency, enhanced security and improved traceability. However, scalability is still one of the main roadblocks to user adoption of blockchain technology. 2018 observed the first step towards addressing these problems.
One of the first solutions requires changes to be made onto the codebase of the blockchain. The first of these is sharding, a type of database partitioned. Sharding method breaks down the blockchain into smaller and more manageable parts, thereby increasing processing output across the board. Sharding is proposed to be implemented once Ethereum moves to Proof-of-Stake model, most probably in 2020.
The second solution is moving some processes “off chain” to reduce the impact of network congestion. With “off-chain”, that can do some processes the transaction instantly before data is written onto the blockchain. Gaming industry are considered an early adopter of blockchain, also shows initiative and quick-witted on solve the blockchain’s biggest issue.
One of the typical examples is in Jun 2018, Etheremon was announced to bring battle “off-chain” to offer players better experience. For a longer term, Etheremon is exploring scalability solutions in the market to . It announced in July working with the Zilliqa development team to use Zilliqa as a utility chain to eradicate transaction fee.
Besides, more advanced applications of collectible blockchain games were introduced and developed in the past year. From the simple collectible blockchain games about collecting item/monsters to trade and make a profit, players can now enjoy more game features on top of those. For example, in Etheremon, players can do training, PvP battling and send their monsters on adventures to earn rewards.
With incredible progress of Dapp Game last year, 2019 promises more changes and more interesting features intertwined between blockchain tech and gaming. Let’s stay tuned for a promising year of blockchain tech entering more deeply into applications we use daily.
Cheers,
Etheremon Team
Website: etheremon.com
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