Decentralized Blockchain Apps (Dapps) Usage is Down as Crypto Market Struggles

Dapps in Decline As Cryptocurrency Markets Lose Value

Once upon a time, blockchain was a magic word. If you said Bitcoin, you could simply get a lot of crazy investors trying to jump on this profitable new venture. The result, as expected, is the current cryptocurrency bear market. As the market started to sober up and the hype died, things started to normalize, but the market took a huge hit in the process and this had an unintended effect.

According to recently reported statistics, decentralized applications (dapps) have been struggling to get the interest of the average cryptocurrency user despite so many people affirming that they are “the future of the internet”.

Decentralized Application’s User Count Plummets 56% Since January

As many industry leaders endorse dapps, decentralized applications and smart contracts have been hailed as the true future of the internet. However, it seems like the world has been adapting to them very slowly, mostly due to the unpredictable nature of the cryptocurrency market and the disappointment of many investors in 2018.

The dapp sub-industry might have its share of questionable software. Apps like PoWH3D are no more than ponzi schemes and a good part of them are aimed at similar purposes, but it would not be fair to the rest of the market to label them just as that. There are hundreds of interesting dapps being developed right now and most of them are already usable in their current state.

The main problem is that the quantity of users that actually are active on the dapps are decreasing. The numbers point to a decrease of 56% since January. CryptoKitties is a great example. Its users plummeted from more than 14 thousand to about 500, a decline of 95%.

CryptoKitties is not a single dapp that simply “died”, this is a general trend. Even Bancor, a somewhat popular decentralized exchange, have seen its numbers decline from 1747 to 457 users. Even the highly anticipated Augur peaked as soon as it launched and then faced a drought of users.

Joey Krug, Augur’s creator, believes that fees are scaring the users right now and that a somewhat clunky interface is getting in the way. However, he does believe in the future of the platform. Despite this, with or without high fees, most dapps are being abandoned.

While about 528 thousand addresses used dapps in January 2018, only 231 thousand people used them last month. As investors have been moving away from using cryptocurrencies, it looks like they also have been moving away from the dapp market, which is tightly linked to the blockchain market at large.

While it is certainly too soon to decide that dapps are done for and that they are not the future, it does like it will take some time until the dapps are strong enough to actually have any chance to grow again. It looks like the peak of the cryptocurrencies is years away and we just had it six months ago. Will dapps be a thing of the moment again in the future? Only future will tell.