https://medium.com/fluence-network/dapp-survey-results-2019-a04373db6452
The content of the article has been partially deleted and revised
2017’s ICO frenzy spawned a slew of new blockchain platforms, making 2018 the first year of dApps.
CryptoKitties’ success has fueled expectations that other dapps will also see explosive growth.
We’ve always wondered what’s going on in the DApp market. From the beginning, this survey was designed to reach out to the DApp developer community to gain insight into what was happening in the market.
We asked a wide range of DApp developers and entrepreneurs to clarify facts, speculation, and rumors about dapps.
We’ll clarify who they are, what they’re doing, what challenges they’re facing, how many active DApp projects there are in the current market, and how hard it is to implement them.
Key points:
1. Despite the harsh market environment in 2018, most of the projects surveyed were launched in that year.
2. A quarter of the projects surveyed were game-related Dapps.
3. About half of the projects use centralized cloud services as backends and use centralized tools like Infura to connect to the Ethereum blockchain.
4. Charging transaction fees in the transaction process is the main profit model adopted by most projects.
5. More than three-quarters of respondents identified introducing new users as the main barrier to adoption.
The survey is structured similarly to the product development lifecycle. We’ll start with the choice of technology platform, then move on to frequently asked questions in development, and finally discuss user acceptance and business challenges.
General information
DApp definition
First, we need to determine which projects can be called DApps.
The term “DApp” comes from the Ethereum community and can be used to define any application that has a “smart contract” as its core component. To reduce ambiguity, the report refers only to applications that focus on the end user.
Based on this definition, we collected a total of 1,624 Dapps. Of those apps, we found contact information for only 900 of them, including Email, Telegram or Discord.
In the end, representatives of 160 Dapps filled out the questionnaire.
A review of DApp surveys
The majority of projects (72%) were launched in 2018, despite the harsh market environment.
Of these, 12.5% are run by independent developers. Most DApp teams have 2 to 5 members (47.5%), and 40% have more than 5 members.
An DApp
Platform (Layer 1 Blockchain)
Most dApps use the Ethereum platform (87%), followed by EOS (19%) and TRON (8%).
Another 10 percent of the projects surveyed are built on multiple blockchains at the same time, and while we’re curious about dapps that use other blockchains, we can’t accurately count the number of these projects.
Overall technology stack
The majority of DApps are web-based frontend, with nearly half (48%) of the dApps surveyed using traditional cloud-based back-end solutions.
It is worth noting that the number of projects using a decentralized storage solution (such as IPFS) (32%) and the number of projects using a centralized CDN (31%) are almost the same in choosing a storage solution.
A similar percentage was found for database selection: 31% of dApps rely on centralized databases, while 25% use distributed databases.
React and Node.js are far and away the most adopted languages and frameworks in terms of the technologies used.
Databases mentioned include MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, with MongoDB being mentioned the most.
The centralized part of the technology stack
More than half of the respondents mentioned that some of their infrastructure must be centrally designed when developing decentralized projects.
Forty-eight percent of the projects surveyed relied on a centralized back end, 31 percent adopted centralized file storage, and 21 percent adopted authentication apis.
DApp development
Tool quality and documentation
Often, the entry of new developers is critical to promoting the adoption of new technologies.
At the same time, DApp developers note that tools and frameworks are extremely volatile in a decentralized technology ecosystem. They can be incompatible with each other, lack project documentation, and sometimes their performance is unpredictable.
“The lack of documentation is also a big problem for blockchain developers.” – CryptoKube
The state of the blockchain network
Among Ethereum DApp developers, 63% of respondents mentioned Infura as a way for them to connect to the Ethereum network.
Some developers point out that sometimes they need to use multiple technologies to connect to the blockchain to keep the data state and user interface of the DApp up to date.
Connectivity issues and node stability issues are also reasons to adopt multiple technologies to connect to the blockchain, which will affect the overall quality of the DApp and negatively impact the end user experience.
Event tracking and data query
Retrieving data from blockchain will also be a challenge, especially when projects require real-time processing capabilities, respondents said. Some developers have adopted internal tools to track events in smart contracts and process incoming data.
“Handling a large number of RPC requests is usually the most frustrating. Internal load balancing is the main solution to this problem.” – Local Ethereum
“The current maintenance database issue is the biggest headache. I think there should be a pay-as-you-go service to solve these kinds of problems.” – Known Origin
“Sometimes the nodes in the network were so unstable (especially when we had outages a year and a half ago) that we needed to develop our own middleware to track transactions.” – Alice
DApp business issues
Audience of your app
Although user information can be obtained by collecting transactions sent to smart contracts, not every interaction between a user and an application involves a smart contract call.
Since we thought developers would be able to get accurate user numbers from our internal analytics tools, we asked them directly how many DApp users they had.
While 58% of dapps have fewer than 50 daily active users, 12% of the projects surveyed have more than 500 daily active users.
Money is
Since 2017, the majority of dapps’ revenue has come from self-funding (38%) and token sales (31%), with venture capital involvement accounting for just 24%.
In 2018, the majority of decentralized projects were still self-funded, with only a small percentage funded through token sales (10%) and venture capital (16%).
In absolute terms, however, these differences are not significant: token sales figures are down slightly, while venture capital figures are up slightly.
The biggest difference between 2017 and 2018 was a nearly four-fold increase in the number of self-funded Dapps.
monetization
The majority of respondents (55%) said they hoped to make money by charging transaction fees. Others plan to make money from subscriptions (16 percent) and advertising (11 percent).
In addition, some respondents suggested selling NFT or using Ethereum as a potential monetization model.
Other business models mentioned by others are as follows:
“Deploy the token as a license for desktop client use and collect license fees from users who profit from our DApp.” – Kryptium
“Release a token based on the ERC-20 standard, such as Augur or KEEP, and its value will increase over time. We can increase revenue by dynamically changing the token mechanism and setting up separate entities to provide centralized services. But in the process, the most important organizational services should still be free of charge. “- anonymous
The user experience
The user guide
When asked about the challenges of introducing DApps, developers cited new user initiation as their biggest concern because of the limited number of users who accept encrypted applications.
It’s hard to explain concepts like creating a wallet, getting tokens, and what GAS is to new DApp users.
“New users of the application don’t know how much gas they should set.” – Riot Cats
“New user boot. As long as the wallet is set up and there’s a certain amount of Ether in hand, it’s easier to understand what’s going on.” — Crypto Care
“If creating a wallet is too complicated for a developer, how can we expect a non-technical person to want to adopt an encryption product that has a lousy user experience?” – FundRequest
Some developers building Dapps based on the Ethereum blockchain say MetaMask’s user experience needs to be further improved.
One reason is that signing each transaction individually can cause too many problems, especially for more complex applications.
“MetaMask does well for simple, single-page games. But complex games like “Chibi Fighters” can support up to 10 web pages at once, which makes it popular everywhere.” — Chibi Fighters “Every transaction requires a signature in the MetaMask.” – FABG
Understand DApps and encryption
Another issue mentioned by some of the respondents was that they needed to educate users who had not studied cryptography in depth.
One of the problems reported in the survey was that users were often surprised by the lack of a “change password” option in encrypted apps.
Another problem is that users often fail to understand the difference between cryptocurrencies, ERC20 tokens, and non-homogenous tokens.
“One of the things we didn’t expect was that we also needed to help people understand that CryptoKitties is not a cryptocurrency.” – CryptoKitties
“We don’t store users’ passwords, so we can’t help users reset their accounts.” – Primas
The main technical points
scalability
To address scalability issues, most developers in the surveyed projects plan to use Layer 2 blockchain or other corresponding solutions to handle user growth.
However, 33% of DApp developers still don’t have a clear plan on how to expand the growing capacity.
Thirty-nine percent of respondents plan to use the existing Layer 2 blockchain platform and 27 percent say they will build their own blockchain platform.
decentralized
Respondents were optimistic about using distributed computing and storage platforms as building blocks for future scalability. However, about a quarter of developers plan to use centralized hardware for intensive computing.
Despite this, 32 percent of respondents said they would likely use distributed database services as their primary data storage solution in the future, and another 33 percent said they were considering a distributed file storage solution.
conclusion
In the blockchain ecosystem, scalability is widely recognized as the primary obstacle facing blockchain-based applications.
Instead, DApp developers responded that their biggest pain points were “limited user numbers” (67 percent) and “poor user experience” (44 percent).
Although only 36% of respondents mentioned possible limitations of scalability, it will eventually become a priority once the project has more users.
We believe the following will help reduce friction between dApps and users:
1. Deeper integration between Web browsers and encrypted wallets.
Such integration can work both ways: Integration of browsers with cryptowallets (as the Opera browser is doing) and integration of decentralized browsers into cryptowallets (see Ethereum’s Status and Trust Wallet, EOS’s Token Pocket, Math Wallet, and Lynx).
2. Emerging reusable cross-platform authentication and user guidance tools (such as Scatter and UniversallLogin) provide better mobile, web and desktop interaction.
3. Widely adopted solutions eliminate Gas costs for end users (e.g. Loom Network, Meta Transaction).
We are eagerly awaiting the development of Dapps in 2019. As an infrastructure project in the blockchain space, we are also looking at the entire DApp ecosystem and trying to keep in touch with it.
In the coming year, we will try to provide as many insights as possible into our research.
What dApps are you interested in?
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Next time, maybe that’s it.
