2018 in Review: What Dappened Around the Decentralized World

As the year draws to a close, we have compiled a list that we think they’re special enough for all of us to remember in 2018.

Below, we will walk you through the Dapp.com retrospective:

MLB Crypto Baseball - The dapp is groundbreaking

CryptoKitties was definitely the one who changed the view of how we interact with items in the digital world in 2017. This year, a dazzling number of dapp projects stood out, MLB Crypto Baseball, KARMA… But Lucid Sight, the studio behind the MLB Crypto Baseball made tons of die-hard baseball fans scream. They put the baseball cards on the blockchain and get LA Dodgers into the crypto. It turned out to be the most innovative idea of cross-industry collaborations. On September 21, 2018, Dodgers airdropped 40,000 ERC-721 NFTs into their home stadium during the game with San Diego Padres. It was the first Crypto giveaway in sports and certainly made history.

Gods Unchained - The dapp stays classic

We believe the gaming industry has the highest adoption of consumer blockchain solutions and there’re 549 games listed on Dapp.com so far, such as RPG, MMO, TCG and more. Gods Unchained brings classic trading card game (TCG) to another level. The team has been hands down the game for quite a long time and seem remarkably successful since 1.5 million cards have been sold, and not to mention, the game hasn’t launched yet.

ForkDelta - The dapp that saw the most users in one day

Regardless of its complex origins to EtherDelta, ForkDelta has been using EtherDelta's smart contract, making ForkDelta the oldest and largest decentralized exchange. ForkDelta has 22,057 users on January 14, 2018. The exchange has always been at the top, in terms of volume and amount of transactions. It reached over 22,000 users in a single day, which is the largest number of daily users in the history of dapps.

Fomo3D - The dapp with the biggest daily transaction volume

On July 20, 2018, Fomo3D reached 53,451.027 ETH transaction volume, with a price of $282.43 USD/ETH the same day on CoinMarketCap, it values $15,096,173.6. It was the launch day of Fomo3D and it had led a boom of “Ponzi”-themed dapps, with dozens of replicas created on various blockchain platforms. Despite the "scam" attribute and the subsequent dispute over security issues, Fomo3D is definitely a milestone in the history of dapp.

OpenSea - The dapp is the go-to dapp

Long before crypto collectibles and NFTs, we spent our Black Friday on eBay, Amazon, and hung out with friends and family while in line outside of Best Buy. Then OpenSea came along. This year we had our first Black Friday Bundle Sale - you can get a good deal of crypto assets with low price, and also not to mention, you can gift one of the digital items to your pals at OpenSea marketplace. Shopping on OpenSea is not just an internet fad in 2018, it is the future. Because of crypto collectibles’ uniqueness, transparent, and liquidity, OpenSea is going to the one of the “market” that plays important role in our everyday life.

ERC721 Validator - The dapp is the most NFTy one

(NFT: Non-Fungible Token)

Go to your OpenSea profile or check your wallet and tell us how many Kitties, CryptoPunks, Axies that you’ve got this year. Shall we say 2018 is an NFTy year? We’d like to shout out to 0xCert, the company behind the ERC721 Validator. They put their effort into creating this incredible platform and gathering more than dozens of projects together to form The Non-fungible Alliance. “Imagination is limited in here. We’re gonna see a lot of different ideas in the near future,” said Urban Osvald, the CSO of 0xCert.

Also, Brian Flynn, the editor of NFTY News that “Celebrities and sports players will issue their own digital merchandise to fans which will grant VIP access and feature discounts.” Just can’t wait for an NFTier 2019!

CryptoKitties - The dapp with the largest number of non-zero transactions

It's been a little over a year ago since the legendary Crypokitties created. Till now (December 30), they have had 1,163,124 new non-zero transactions on Ethereum. And the amount of non-zero transactions (purchase) proof that CryptoKitties is not outdated. At the same time, they did not stagnate in only producing Kitties. Benefits from the openness and collaborativeness of blockchain, they are able to extend their KittyVerse and transform from crypto collectibles to an open platform. We are seeing a lot of games are being built around this most recognized IP in the industry. Also, they have the most page views and likes on Dapp.com, which means the Kitties are still leading their way to inspiring the decentralized space.

Dice2win - The dapp with the fastest growth

Dapp.com Ranking is the way that we measure the dapp’s healthy by collecting and monitoring dapp activity and performance and filter out the fake transactions from the active and valid ones. According to Dapp.com ranking, Dice2win has been growing exponentially in the past quarter and becoming the project with the fastest growth rate. Since its launch in Q3 2018, Dice2win has scored over 80 out of 100, the highest one was 94.93. Despite the increasingly fierce competition in the betting games sector, Dice2win's community is steadily growing as new games and features are being introduced. As long as their smart contracts are secure, we believe that they will continue to lead the way for a while.

Etheremon - The dapp with the nostalgic feeling

Remember Pokemon Go? It’s only around a year since we had crypto games and it’s still a long way to become what we would see in the movie Ready Player One, but you will find the games that just like Super Mario or Pokemon Go now. The co-founder of Etheremon Nedrick said in an interview with us last month, “All of us love Pokemon, and we grew up with it as our team was all born in the 90s.” Games like Etheremon make us have nostalgia feeling in a crypto way.

SuperRare and KnowOrigin - The dapps empower the digital art market

We are captivated with the fusion of art and tech. This year is also a very transformative year for the art market. SuperRare and KnowOrigin leverage the technology, make the artwork more accessible, and create the opportunities for the crypto art world and established art world to overlap.

In June, we invited John Orion Young (aka JOY), an SF based artist who’s working in VR and blockchain to our meetup to talk about his work. “With the blockchain, we can now create, collect, and trade rare crypto art and collectibles, it’s a powerful tool that incorporates digital media,” said John.

Steem Monsters - The dapp that is fully decentralized

Steem Monsters is a Steem-powered collectible card trading (CCT) game where you can try to reunite the Splinterlands. With a pack of cards, yeah. What makes this game special to us is that it is one of the few games that realizes full decentralization. Or, in another word, every action in the game is recorded and verified on the blockchain. While a lot of popular social media dapps have brought a large audience to the Steem blockchain, the success of Steem Monster shows us the potential of building a vibrant and diverse dapp community on Steem.

Dice - The dapp with the tremendous total transaction volume

Dice is one of the games that can represent the EOS community as a whole. Until today (December 30, 2018), Dice reached 363,952,284.34 EOS transaction volume with a price of $2.65 USD/EOS the same day on CoinMarketCap, it values $964,473,553.5. As for a project with 29,352 total users, it’s quite extraordinary.

CryptoGladiator - The dapp is first game based on NEO blockchain

Back in the summer, it was a wave of NEO games - A series gaming competition was organized by NEO and their communities. A few games caught our eyes from the competition and CryptoGladiator was one of them. On the first day of pre-sale, NEO blockchain almost got clogged up by those Gladiators enthusiasts with all Gladiators sold out within 8 hours. We can expect their official launch in early 2019.

The dapp(s) with the highest number of consistent users

CryptoKitties, IDEX, and ForDelta had over 100 daily users from the period of January 1st to December 28th. We had recorded an average lifetime (total amount of transactions reached 1,000 with a DAU of 20 users) of 362 days for dapps. And the listed 3 dapps had never had a day when the number of users was less than 100 this year. With the combination of a centralized matchmaking and decentralized on-chain exchange, IDEX is providing a trustless, high-speed trading experience to stand out among the other DEXs.

Community’s Choice

One of Dapp.com’s unique features is that people can support their favorite dapps by liking the dapp pages and adding them to their list of favorites. It is the best way for our community to surface great dapps that might otherwise remain under the radar. Besides CryptoKitties who has the most page views, dice2win, IDEX, Kyber Network, FCK, Etheremon, ForDelta, Decentraland, Gods Unchained, and Token Store are the top 10 dapps with most page views.

How far are we from “The Dapp Year” and what should we keep an eye on in 2019?

These are questions we get asked about all the time and we will break it down into details in our Q4 Dapp Market Report with 2019 dapp trends. Please stay tuned!

Until now, another year bites the dust.

Have a happy New Year, from all of us at Dapp.com!