A Shallow Dive Into Top 500 Dapps On DappRadar (2022)
目录
Before Getting Started
Providing data-driven insights is part of my product operation work content. Months ago, the team were seeking to add the capability of accessing decentralized applications (“dApps”) onto our currently live web3 product. Before proceeding to the next stage, we the dev team needed to provide answers to some general questions raised by the boss and stakeholders, such as “What are dApps?”, “Which blockchains should we choose to support?”, and “How can we enable our users to access dApps?” Hence, I was asked to look into dApps, so as to offer references for the team to answer those questions.
What are dApps? According to ethereum.org’s definition,
A decentralized application (dapp) is an application built on a decentralized network that combines a smart contract and a frontend user interface.
DappRadar.com was chosen as it’s one of the most used app store, which tracks over 3,000 dApps across 100+ blockchains. The platform ranks those tracked dApps by specific metrics like daily users, daily volume and more. Therefore, for my purpose (i.e. trying to answer our stakeholders’ rest questions), I targeted at the top 500 dApps on DappRadar, collecting and compiling a variety of public data from the website on the day of June 15, 2022, and produced this report.
Notes
All data collected were the publicly available information on the web.
I’m not a data engineer, and thus I can’t guarantee all the data being properly extracted and processed. Moreover, as of the time writing, all statistics are obsolete. So…don’t be serious.
Data Collection
Below are what I collected from DappRadar Rankings page on the day of June 15, 2022.
Dapp Name
Detail Page URL (link to this dApp’s detail page on DappRadar, for accessing the dApp)
Ranking
Primary blockchain (the blockchain on which this dApp was built)
Additional blockchains (applicable to dApps available on multiple blockchains)
Category
Balance (total amount of incoming value to dapp’s smart contracts)
Users (number of unique wallet addresses interacting with dapp’s smart contracts)
User changes (percentage change of user amount within the selected period)
Volume (total value of assets in dapp’s smart contracts)
My Discoveries
Dapps Deployed Blockchains
Primary Blockchains
A total number of 41 blockchains were found in the collection. However, 9 blockchains hosted more than two thirds of the top 500 dApps.
| Rank | Blockchain Network | Number of Dapps Built On | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BNB Chain | 118 | 23.6% |
| 2 | WAX | 58 | 11.6% |
| 3 | Ethereum | 50 | 10.0% |
| 4 | Polygon | 36 | 7.2% |
| 5 | ThunderCore | 22 | 4.4% |
| 6 | Cronos | 20 | 4.0% |
| 7 | Avalanche | 15 | 3.0% |
| 8 | Solana | 15 | 3.0% |
| 9 | Near | 10 | 2.0% |
| Total | 354 dApps | 68.8% |
Additional Blockchains
An additional blockchain refers to the blockchain on which a dApp is available apart from the one it was built on.
Dapps Capability Of Running On Multiple Chains
Most of the dApps could run on only one blockchain, while 58 dApps were found available on more than one blockchain.
| Type | DApp Count | % |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple chains | 58 | 11.6% |
| Single chain | 395 | 79.0% |
| Null | 47 | 9.4% |
To make a dApp available on multiple chains, its developer needs to deploy the dApp, with necessary alterations, on each blockchain, provided that these chains are interoperatable. In this case, the interoperatability is achieved by the following:
· Sidechains
For example, in the case of WAX being the primary blockchain, 4 dApps were found capable to run on the additional chains EOS and Telos. Their capability were from the interoperatability between the main chain and the side chains:
- EOS - the original main net
- WAX - an EOSIO based side chain
- TELOS - an EOS side-chain
Still in the case of WAX being the primary blockchain, 2 dApps were found the BNB chain as their additional chain. BNB Chain is not a sidechain on EOS. In this scenario, it’s EVM compatibility that enables the WAX chain and [1]BNB Chain to be interoperable, providing these two dApps with the capability of running on both blockchains.
· EVM Compatibility
EVM stands for Ethereum Virtual Machine. Simply put, EVM is the environment in which all Ethereum accounts and smart contracts live. Hence, EVM compatible blockchains are independent blockchains of Ethereum but run the EVM. This makes the EVM-compatible blockchains not only be interoperatable with Ethereum, but also with each other. As a result, developers can migrate their dApps from Ethereum to an EVM-compatible chain, or from one EVM compatible blockchain to another, easily making their dApps available on multiple chains.
Of 9 primary blockchains that hosted more than two thirds of DappRadar top 500 dApps, only one is not EVM compatible.
| # | Blockchain Network | EVM-Compatible |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BNB Chain | YES |
| 2 | WAX | YES |
| 3 | Ethereum | N/A |
| 4 | Polygon | YES |
| 5 | ThunderCore | YES |
| 6 | Cronos | YES |
| 7 | Avalanche (C-Chain) | YES |
| 8 | Solana | YES |
| 9 | Near | NO |
Dapps Accessibility
It was very time-consuming to check the accessibility of those dApps because this had to be done manually. As it was not practical to check all 500 dApps on my own, I chose to focus on dApps available on the following 3 blockchain networks:
- Ethereum
- Polygon
- Tron
This got me a much smaller collection of 94 dApps, which facilitated my manual check. Below are my check results (as of the day June 16, 2022).
Connect To A Blockchain Wallet to Start
| Supported Wallet Type | Count |
|---|---|
| Any WalletConnect-compatible wallets | 51 |
| MetaMask and other specific wallets | 5 |
| MetaMask only | 11 |
| Native wallet only | 9 |
| Total | 76 dApps |
Traditional Login Or Download Required
| Type | Count |
|---|---|
| Sign up/in with email | 8 |
| Not a web app. Download its mobile app to start | 3 |
| Total | 11 dApps |
Unaccessible
| Type | Count |
|---|---|
| 404 | 3 |
| No response | 4 |
| Total | 7 dApps |
Summary
Based on the discoveries above, the answers to our stakeholders’ questions were clear.
What are dApps?
According to ethereum.org’s definition,
A decentralized application (dapp) is an application built on a decentralized network that combines a smart contract and a frontend user interface.
Which blockchains should we choose to support?
Simply according to the number of dApps hosted on and the interoperatability of the network, good choices could include BNB Chain, WAX, Ethereum, Polygon, ThunderCore, Cronos, Avalanche and Solana.
How can we enable our users to access dApps?
It seems that WalletConnect and MetaMask are the most used solutions in the industry to access dApps.
Appendix
Software Used
- web data extracting: Octoparse (plus a handful of manual copy & paste)
- data processing : Microsoft Excel
- charts making: Microsoft Excel
Data Collection Sample
- 1.BNB Chain is comprised of BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain. The latter is an EVM compatible chain. ↩