To their proponents, dapps – decentralized applications – are the future of internet. To their critics, they’re multi-million dollar sinkholes, with huge development costs, poor UI, and no users. Are dapps like Augur and IDEX early test cases for the web to come, or impractical experiments that are destined to fail?
Also read: Bitcoin ATMs Now In The Thousands Around the World
Decentralized Cash is a Success But Decentralized Apps Remain Unproven
Hating on dapps has become something of a parlor game. They’re an easy target after all. While all the headlines are about VCs pouring millions of dollars of seed money into dapps like Crypto Kitties, and the highly publicized launch of Augur (market cap $311 million), behind the scenes, things are less than rosy. The latter, which launched with great fanfare several years and personnel changes later, typically has less than 60 daily active users (DAUs) and yet Augur is supposedly ethereum’s flagship dapp.
A glance around the categories on Dappradar shows that the number of people talking about dapps is multitudes greater than the number actually using them. For less than 90 DAU, your dapp can make it into the top 20 for all categories and for around 230 DAU into the top 10. Only decentralized exchanges IDEX and Forkdelta, plus the runaway ponzi game Fomo3D, have more than 1,000 daily active users. It’s to be expected that numbers should be low in the evolution of what is still a nascent technology, but should they be so low that you could squeeze the users of the average dapp into a small room?
“Design is the Killer App for Crypto”
A widely shared article from Coinbase this week, titled “Why design is the killer app for crypto”,
