Gambling and high risk DApps have been popular all the way back since the first bitcoin dice sites. However, DeFi seems to be catering to a similar user base. Because, as funny as that might sound, DeFi is eating the gambling/high risk DApp market share.
Let’s take a closer look at DeFi vs. gambling below. Or read our ealier post on DeFi in China:
Let’s first take a look at the DappRadar DApp charts. You will find that a lot of users are using high risk and gambling DApps: Around 43% of top 100 DApps by user count.
Gambling and high risk involves everything from fair/provable gambling (i.e. DApps based on smart contracts that are verified on Etherscan and maybe even with a security audit) to unverified ponzi schemes.
Note how the user numbers are high, while the dollar volumes are actually low compared to the bigger DeFi applications. High-risk DApps have smaller users, but many of those.
The categories of DApps that are not high-risk such as fair gambling, games and tooling (such as ENS or our own DApp tools) have been stagnating recently. Who wants to pay $10 gas fee to buy an NFT?
At the same time, DeFi has been growing like crazy. Not a huge surprise: A $10 gas fee doesn’t matter that much if you get (or at least hope for) a 10x of your ‘investment’.
Overall, again, high risk DApps have by far the most users.
However, notice the plunge in user numbers over the last 2 months: We are seeing less high risk DApp users while DeFi is growing.
DeFi is literally eating away the market share of high risk/gambling dapps.
Let us know what we should write about next! Read our earlier post here:
