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The number of new decentralized applications (DApp) under development on the two most popular smart contract platforms, Ethereum and EOS, is currently at its highest ever rate. There are about 180 new offers every month.
However, there is still a considerable gap between the development of DApp and the effective use of DApp. Clearly something is hindering the widespread adoption of decentralized applications, but what?
The total number of Ethereum, EOS and other DApp reaches 2,432, but no mass adoption
According to the Decentralized Application Monitoring website, StateOfTheDApps.com, the number of new DApps created each month was the highest ever achieved for the month of December 2018. In the last month of the last year they were 179 new DApps published
The Ethereum network continues to be the most popular platform for decentralized app creation with 105 of the total number of new projects launched on it. This fact shows that Ethereum still boasts the most active developer community of all these platforms. However, DApps on the network are used only by 141,300 users each month.
In the meantime, despite not hosting the same number of projects, the EOS network is by far the most popular among real users. EOS boasts well over three times the number of users that Ethereum does.
The largest category of decentralized applications on all platforms is games. Currently there are 478 decentralized games used by over 29,000 active monthly users. The DApps games category has accounted for 640,900 transactions of the relevant cryptocurrency in the last 30 days. Given the success of CryptoKitties last year and the constant popularity (and profitability) of mobile games, this is hardly a surprise.
The most popular category with users themselves is storage space. Projects like StorJ, Everipedia, X Cloud and others have been used by 106,420 monthly users.
It is interesting to note that the decentralized top-level application (based on the above and other combined metrics) continues to be the monetized socialized blogging platform, Steemit. Steemit is hosted on its own network and currently boasts less than 5,000 users every 24 hours.
DApp numbers growing rapidly, not so much use
Evidently, developers around the world are excited about the new opportunities created by decentralized programming architecture. However, the number of application users is never close to those of more established applications. Of course, this is understandable as even the longest decentralized projects on networks such as EOS and Ethereum are only two years old.
That said, there are other factors that hinder the mass adoption of decentralized applications. Firstly, there is currently a large barrier to entry with applications hosted on EOS, Ethereum or other smart-enabled platform. Users must first possess the relevant digital currency to run any DApp. It's not as simple as visiting the Play or Apple store and press "download". Expecting that an average user of mobile devices or computers for the first time to sign up with a cryptographic exchange that may never have heard of and buy an ETH, EOS or STEEM is frankly unrealistic at the moment.
Ideally, the process of buying digital currency to use a decentralized application should be completely hidden from the user. If it happened behind the scenes, in the app itself, DApps would be a far less daunting prospect for those who do not know cryptocurrency yet.
Other problems affecting both decentralized application developers and users are the limitations of the platforms themselves. Since they are created using blockchain networks, DApps are inherently inefficient. The user experience remains behind those found in centralized applications. Since the EOS network is capable of many more transactions per second than Ethereum, this technical superiority leading to a better user experience could be the basis for the largest number of users on EOS-based DApps.
Meanwhile, Ethereum is much more "tested by the battle" of EOS. As a developer, the Ethereum network is a safer option than the latest and most intelligent contract-enabled platforms. With more experimentation experience on Ethereum, there is a much larger pool of resources to exploit for developers when they create their applications. This may explain why developers continue to use Ethereum, although EOS enjoys many more users.
Related reading: The largest Ethereum development company, ConsenSys, can lay off 50 ~ 60% of the company's workforce
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