Where is Crypto’s App Store?
Today, there is an app for just about everything. And crypto apps are popping up left and right to fill the needs of the crypto community. This emerging field is exciting and new, but at the moment, it is also quite disorganized.
Say you want to find a new app. You go to the App Store or Google Play, search for the app, download and you’re ready to use it. In the crypto space, it's not so easy, and only a tiny fraction of crypto-related apps are available on Apple or Google’s app stores.
A quick overview of the crypto market reveals the need for a crypto app store:
- The crypto user base hit the 100 million mark in January 2021.
- As of February 2021, there are nearly 70 million blockchain wallet users and over 80 different types of wallets.
- As of August 2021, there were nearly 4,000 active cryptocurrency-based decentralized applications running across more than a dozen blockchain platforms, including Ethereum, Solana, BSC, and more. (This number does not account for all the centralized crypto apps in the market like Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken.)
If there are so many crypto apps already on the market, where are they hosted?
A simple google search, “where to find crypto apps” reveals websites featuring the “top 10 crypto apps”, and “the best crypto apps of 2021”, but an exhaustive list of apps can’t be found this way.
Dapp.com is a resource to find crypto apps, but it’s not a marketplace to download and use apps. It’s just a list with links to the external app websites.
DappRadar is another resource to discover, track, and compare crypto apps, but again, there is no way to launch apps internally.
Also, neither of these platforms uses a system of community validation to ensure that featured apps are secure.
Is there a real app store for crypto?
Good news for app users and creators, there is finally a true marketplace for crypto apps:
Magic Square’s Magic Store, the first marketplace dedicated to cryptocurrency-related applications.
On the Magic Store users can discover community-vetted crypto apps. The store is highly searchable through a multitude of filters and categories, and users don’t even need to download apps they want to use.
Instead, users add apps to their Magic Spaces, a personalized dashboard to organize and launch apps. Users connect to all their apps via a single SSI secured login and then select apps to open within their Spaces.
This means that users no longer need to pop in and out of different tabs and logins to access their apps: all wallets and credentials now exist under the Magic Square umbrella. For added convenience, users can access Spaces across all devices.
Summary
The crypto app store that we have all been waiting for is finally here. Now let’s sit back and see how the Magic Store changes how we interact with crypto.