DEV Community: Dapp.com

Put resume on the blockchain and decentralized insurance, anyone?

Dapp.com — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 07:10:51 +0000

The world we’re living in is becoming more complex — digital fraud, data breach, (exchange) hacks are on the rise. More unprecedented security challenges that we have to deal with in our lives than ever before. The good thing is blockchain technology could be the ultimate solution for these universal problems, and decentralized applications have more effective approaches in tackling the threats of today.

We've seen new dapps that want to shape the regular tech world by creating a decentralized mutual insurance platform (like Nexus Mutual) and building tools (like resume builder tool BlockResume) that respect your privacy.

Do you think decentralized apps will make people's future life more secure and more enjoyable? And will you move your apps to the blockchain or build new apps on top of the blockchains?

Ask app founders from the Blockstack community anything!

Dapp.com — Sun, 16 Feb 2020 04:17:11 +0000

Hello buidlers, we will be hosting our monthly AMA with app founders from the Blockstack community next Tuesday!

This time, we are very excited to have Jessica of Dcasso and Colin and Álvaro from Reclaim join Dapp.com Dev Community AMA to answer all the questions from the community in the zoom call!

Ever wondered how the teams decided to start building dapps on top of Blockstack? What it feels like to be a Can't Be Evil advocate? How do they deal with data privacy and the real business world? What are their upcoming projects? Mark your calendar because this is your time to get all those questions answered.

More details > https://www.dapp.com/article/dapp-com-dev-community-ama-guests-dcasso-reclaim

Join us!

9 Blockchains to Watch in 2020 and Why

Dapp.com — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 14:46:32 +0000

1. Ethereum

As the first-ever smart contract platform, Ethereum and its community have launched and incubated the latest and the most advanced apps of the industry. It has been the leader of the blockchain and dapps since its launch, from the ICO trend in 2017, blockchain games and NFT in 2018, to the booming of DeFi applications in 2019. Nearly all the innovations of blockchain use cases have come from the Ethereum ecosystem. In 2020, Ethereum will still have to face the price drop since 2017, but the launch of Ethereum 2.0 which is expected to reduce costs, solve network congestion, and achieve high performance must be one of the most noteworthy events in the blockchain space.

2. EOS

2019 was a year of heavy losses for the EOS ecosystem. Projects who are the earliest believers and adopters, such as EOSBet, EOS Knights, and Prospectors, have all migrated to other blockchains. And almost all the network data, including new dapps, users, and volume are behind TRON — EOS's “brother” who launched its project around the same time. EOS has been congested, and the price of CPU has increased by over 100 times after EIDOS went live. Although the price of EIDOS has dropped and the pressure is getting lower down, it still occupies over 85% of the transaction of EOS. In Q4 2019, the number of average EOS daily active dapp users has dropped to 15k, which is a decrease of 80% from the third quarter. In 2020, can Voice — the expected “game-changing dapp” with a $30M cost domain name, bring EOS back to the peak?

3. TRON

TRON is the most hardworking, or the busiest blockchain in 2019. People shouldn't only remember the Warren Buffet dinner and Justin Sun’s kidney stone, but also its achievements — TRC-20 USDT (Currently there are over 900 million USDT issued on TRON, nearly 20% of the total circulation of USDT), partnerships with two public listed companies Samsung and Opera, and the two largest investments/acquisitions in Q4 (Poloniex and DLive, the world's largest decentralized live streaming platform). There are also rumors of TRON’s potential acquisitions of impactful dapps like Steemit and Dtube. TRON has come up with its own way to grow the ecosystem through investments and acquisitions, just like a large enterprise. Will this be sustainable and successful in 2020 and beyond? TRON deserves our attention.

4. Wax

Wax has successfully imported a significant number of EOS projects through partnerships. The leading EOS-based projects include Prospectors, who has the highest number of active users, EOSBet (EarnBet), the biggest gambling platform, and Karma, a leading mobile social app. There is Splinterlands, the most active blockchain game on Steem with one of the most active NFT trading markets in the world has also migrated to Wax. With the successful debut of its cloud wallet WCW to simplify the user onboarding process, Wax has gained over 400,000 mainnet accounts opened within a month since its launch. Moreover, Opskins, one of the world's largest gaming asset trading platforms, has started to shift its resources to Wax. Will Wax become the largest blockchain for games in 2020? OR: Will Wax becomes the blockchain that dominates the game market this year?

5. Terra

In 2019, the most well-known model in the blockchain space must be “Public Blockchain + Stable Currency”. Yes, we’re talking about Facebook Libra and DECP issued by the PBoC. But you should not miss Terra, a global blockchain payment network that has already been at the forefront. According to our statistics, the Terra-based mobile payment platform CHAI has more than 500,000 active on-chain users and it has already been processing over $1M of settlements every day. Terra has structured the overall business arrangement in Asia and announced its plan to support more financial services. Will Terra stand out from the most competitive stablecoin war in 2020?

6. Cosmos

Unlike many of the above-mentioned blockchain platforms, Tendermint, a core of Cosmos blockchain, allowing developers to build custom blockchains instead of dapps. Currently, Cosmos has already established a strong ecosystem and a few projects are powered by Cosmos, including Binance Chain (Binance Dex), Lino(the decentralized content sharing platform that has already supported DLive’s 410,000+ on-chain users in the past 3 months), and Terra (the leading blockchain payment network). These projects have proved the scalability and usability of the Cosmos blockchain. Now we’re expecting to see Cosmos realize its vision of building the Internet of Blockchains.

7. Blockstack

As a decentralized computing network, Blockastack boats people and projects that put users in control of their data and identity. Last year, Blockstack had an amazing run: Conducted the first SEC qualified token sale in US history and raised more than $20 million under SEC Reg A+ exemption; the Blockstack community is growing exponentially — from only a couple of dozen dapps to more than 300 dapps at the end of 2019; quietly approaching to its first million users. Blockstack not just brings us the dapps that respect our privacy and give us the digital freedom as they committed to do so, and also bring usability into the dapp ecosystem and bring decentralization closer than ever to normal people's life. 2020 will be an interesting year for Blockstack with the launch of Stacks 2.0 and a potential IPO? We'll see.

8. Link

The social media giant Line is the 20th largest social app in the world with 194 million users with 164 million MAU. Link Network is the blockchain platform built by Line. Line has obtained a crypto exchange license in Japan to allow users to purchase cryptocurrencies, including Link directly from Bitbox exchange, one of the Line apps. In the new year, we should pay attention to this dream combination of regulatory compliance with 200 million users and see how it will bring numerous new blockchain apps and mass blockchain applications.

9. Klaytn

Klatyn, the blockchain project built by South Korea’s most popular social app Kkao social giant Kakao, aiming to provide the daily usage of blockchain to 50 million people. Currently, as one of the top five crypto trading markets, South Korea has a very high expectation for Klaytn yet the regulation is still unclear. Backed by the Kakao Group, Klaytn is offered resourceful support but also it brings a lot of pressure from the regulatory agencies to Klaytn. There are already many applications built on Klaytn. Can we see the circulation of Klay (the token of Klaytn) and its utility within these dapps in 2020?

Originally published on https://www.dapp.com/article/9-blockchains-to-watch-in-2020-and-why

The new concept of dapp that you wanna see or build in 2020 🤔

Dapp.com — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 04:48:32 +0000

dapp Today is the Internet in 1992-1993?

Dapp.com — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 14:57:35 +0000

Marc Andreessen helped start the Internet revolution when he co-wrote early web browser Mosaic and co-founded Netscape. He mentioned that the recent development of the blockchain technology and its various difficulties seem to be a historical of the development of the Internet. More precisely, the current world of blockchain is about the Internet world of 1992-1993.

What do you think about this?

Q2 2019 Dapp Market Report

Dapp.com — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 05:51:51 +0000

Summary:

Q2 2019 Dapp Market Report summarizes the most comprehensive data and provides insights into 6 mainstream blockchains — Ethereum, EOS, TRON, Steem, TomoChain and IOST — they represent the whole blockchain ecosystem with the most active users in the market.

Key Highlights:

Overall Market

Dapp stays strong in Q2 with a total transaction volume of $3.28 billion, slightly higher than the amount in Q1 this year.

Slow down from the bull market? No. The number of active users (1,159,482), amount of transactions made ($324.63M), amount of transaction volume in Q2 had reached the all-time high.

484 new dapps have entered the market this quarter. Ethereum is still the first choice for developers, followed by TRON and EOS. Newly launched blockchains like TomoChain and IOST are quickly expanding but the first tier blockchains have already gone way ahead.

Users are getting active. Over 700,000 new users started using dapps (at least once) in Q2 - the highest ever in one quarter. And among the 6 blockchains, over 35% of the existing dapp users used dapps at least once in Q2 - also the highest ever.

Ethereum Dapps

Ethereum dapps and their users are more diverse compared to the others. 70% of the users used decentralized exchanges, social dapps, finance dapps, etc., instead of gambling and involved in high-risk investment products.

Ethereum is still the number one choice for developers to build decentralized apps in Q2.

The Ethereum dapp users are back! User activeness has a strong correlation with ETH price - the higher the price, the more Ethereum dapp users. And more token holders are converted to dapp users as the price keep going up since mid of May 2019.

EOS Dapps

Most active dapp user community - almost 65% of the existing EOS dapp users are active in Q2. And 33.36% of the EOS token holders used EOS dapps, which is the second highest.

Over 80% of the EOS dapps stayed active in Q2, the second most active of all blockchains after TRON.

TRON Dapps

TRON is the most active blockchain for dapps. TRON dapps are the most active and TRON also has the largest amount of active dapp users over Ethereum and EOS. 82% (338 out of 412) of the TRON dapps are active and 445,054 TRX holders used dapps in Q2.

The higher the TRX price, there are less transactions made to the TRON dapps. TRON is the only blockchains in the report who has a negative correlation between token price and dapp usage.

Over 300,000 new accounts used TRON dapps in Q2. Tron did the most successful job to get their dapps out to the public and expand their user base.

Steem Dapps

The Steem apps are built and operated as long-lasting projects. All the active Steem app in Q1 were still active in Q2.

The Steem community is getting less active and the grow (of content contributors) is getting slow. User activeness has dropped 20%.

IOST Dapps

The IOST blockchain has recorded a total transaction amount of 20.58 million, triple the amount of Ethereum's in Q2.

IOST has 15,000 dapp users within its first 3 months since main net launch - the same scale as EOS in its first 3 months.

TomoChain Dapps

Over 60% of the TomoChain dapp users used finance dapps. Most of the dapp users were driven by TomoMaster, the governance dapp for TomoChain.

Over 70% of the transaction volume was contributed by the finance dapps. There is a huge difference compared to the other blockchains where gambling and high-risk dapps took huge place at the early stage.

Read the full report here

If you have any feedback, drop us a line!

Q1 2019 Dapp Market Report

Dapp.com — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 15:18:31 +0000

Summary:

Q1 2019 dapp market report summarizes the most comprehensive data and provides insights into 4 mainstream blockchains — Ethereum, EOS, Steem, and TRON—they represent the whole blockchain ecosystem with the most active users in the market.

Highlights:

Dapp Growth and Activity

In the first quarter in 2019, a total of 504 dapps were added to Dapp.com, with Ethereum-based dapps dominated and accounted for more than half of the newly listed dapps. It shows that Ethereum is still the No.1 choice for developers to build their dapp on. At the same time, we also have seen a trend in multi-chain developing, as many Ethereum dapps expand on multiple chains, such as Ethereum + EOS or Ethereum + Tron.

In terms of the dapp activeness, 95% of the EOS dapps remained active—with 326 out of the 341 dapps had transactions in the first quarter. More than 80% of dapps that were built on the Steem and TRON networks had active users, too. On the other hand, although beating other chains in terms of dapp amount, nearly 600 Ethereum dapps were in “inactive” status without a single transaction record over the past 3 months.

Dapp Volume

The 4 mainstream blockchains remained strong in Q1 and hit a total transaction volume of $3.2 billion. EOS and TRON are the largest blockchains in dapp ecosystem—both of them processed over $1 billion transaction volume. As for Ethererum, the debate between PoS (or DPoS) and PoW will continue to center around the efficiency and suspected bot trading issue due to zero transaction fee.

User Growth and Activity

TRON dapps had more than 300,000 active users, followed by EOS dapps with around 260,000 active users. By the end of Q1 2019, the number of the wallets created on TRON mainnet has exceeded $2.3 million, among them, 15.46% were dapp users, raised nearly 1.5 fold since the beginning of 2019. Moreover, more than 80% of the TRON dapp users have used and made at least one transaction in dapps over the last 3 months.

The growth of new users was mainly driven by gambling dapps—which brought nearly 350,000 users to the dapp ecosystem. The increases of new users in games and exchanges were neck to neck, both sectors attracted around 90,000 new users in Q1.

Read the full report here >> Dapp.com Q1 Dapp Market Report

Why Is Developing a Dapp So Complicated?

Dapp.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 14:45:23 +0000

Decentralized apps (dapps) are the catalysts for the adoption of decentralized web and bridge the gap between the end user and decentralized networks.

Despite their significant importance (or precisely for that reason), their development is no plain sailing. The tech that builds a dapp is not only extremely complex, but the immutable and irreversible character of operations on the blockchain complicates the process even further once a developer encounters errors or issues.

In this article, we explore the frequent way of developing a dapp and the common impediments of this approach.

How straightforward is (not) development of a dapp?

The essence of dapps are decentralized systems that run them and execute their functions. Most often, dapps utilize the blockchain tech, sometimes also the distributed ledger tech. In combination with cryptography, decentralized systems enable inherently immutable, irreversible and sealed operations.

The features of dapps are therefore not only powerful but also pose a massive obstacle in the development process.

When building a dapp, developers can’t count on straightforward instructions let alone a template that would guide them through a fixed order of needed steps. Instead, they face a mess similar to this:

Developing a dapp requires multiple and often iterations and adaptations, as well as a thorough understanding of various layers of decentralized systems and communication elements.

The dapp development cycle

An example of a dapp built on the Ethereum blockchain demonstrates quite accurately the common process of building a dapp.

First, you establish the environment for writing smart contracts, you proceed to install the nodes (Geth, Parity, etc.) and MetaMask, and launch the code editor. Then, you start writing smart contracts in Solidity.
Once you create your smart contract, you test, compile and deploy it onto the Ethereum blockchain.
Then, you realize that the code is not working. It worked fine in the local test, but not on the Geth node. You return to the beginning, look for the errors (Solidity does not provide Error messages as other languages do), fix them, and test the contract again, compile and deploy it. By now, it should be working.
But it doesn’t. This time, the smart contract works fine on the Geth node, but the Parity node is something else.
You go back to look for the glitch, after a while you manage to find, and finally fix it. You deploy the dang thing again and expect it to work.
But somehow - it doesn't. It did work on the Parity node, there’s no issue with the Geth node, either. So where’s the catch? Maybe, the connection with MetaMask failed.
Again, you go back and fix this, too. Now, it seems like all the issues have been solved and the smart contract seems to be working well.
If luck (or tech) is not on your side, you encounter issues with Ganache. Maybe, the checkSum does not work as it used to. Or, lower-cased addresses don’t produce the same result on MetaMask as they did locally. And the struggle continues...

What else?

Frequent trials and iterations are an unavoidable part of dapp development, which means loads of time but also solid experience in the field is required. Dapp developers should be able to foresee potential problems as soon as possible to avoid excessive testing which consumes gas in ETH.

Even once the dapp works, a developer should analyze the operation that was executed successfully. If, for example, a function of the smart contract was asset transfer, its result should be verified, too. Also, dapp's price performance should be assessed by checking the gas fee that had been consumed in operation and comparing it to other transactions and values.

Next comes audit. Third-party inspection of smart contracts is important to eliminate as many malfunctions as possible. Great auditors ideally know the best practices of the Ethereum blockchain and are a step ahead of you in detecting issues and proposing solutions. However, even audit service can sometimes be subpar, and projects therefore often rely on community feedback. Community review is an optimal solution because both parties share the same interest - to produce and then to use a top-notch dapp. Bug bounties thus serve as a great incentive for the developer community that benefits all partakers.

Then, there’s dapp front-end which should effectively connect the dapp's UI with the blockchain via communication logic. Often, developers are left with an incredibly extensive library when building the communication logic, which impedes front-end optimization.

Last but not certainly not least, a dapp - as much as a centralized app - needs some essential elements like API, hosting, domains, etc.

What are the issues with this approach?

This way of developing a dapp is far from optimized, as it creates some considerable issues:

Solidity is somehow less developer-friendly compared to mature languages since it lacks error warnings. Developers should foresee the issues, and once they occur, they're on their own to detect them.
Cryptographic sealing of each block of the data string prevents the developer to go back and edit it.
Frequent testing is essential before deploying the smart contract onto the blockchain, but it also costs ETH.
Choosing the most appropriate framework is difficult since each protocol comes with a different set of functions.
Substantial gas fees are induced with frequent testing. Furthermore, if additional functions are integrated into the smart contract, the gas cost increases.
Massive libraries in the communication layer come in many versions and produce specific errors, which leads to...
Very complicated front-end optimization of a dapp.

Dealing with all these issues takes time and a strong team of developers with years of experience, which produces significant expense, yet still does not quite guarantee a quality dapp result. Even a small error can cause a lot of damage, so it also takes its toll on the developer experience.

Ultimately, this slow and cost-ineffective process is one of the biggest blockers that impede the adoption of the blockchain tech and dapps in real businesses and institutions.

How to develop a dapp with much less hassle?

If we could funnel all the above complexity down to just a few lines of code, it would cut down development time and budget significantly while providing faster and quality results.

Instead of addressing and improving one issue at a time, the whole dapp development process should be redefined. Developers should leverage a tool that saves them time and tackles the listed issues effectively.

The 0xcert (https://0xcert.org/) Framework happens to be just that.

It was built specifically for application developers by solving several adoption issues:

It cuts the need for a blockchain expert with years of experience.
The project doesn't have to hire security experts and expensive auditors.
All a dapp developer needs is knowledge of building a website.

The solution is a simple and intuitive JavaScript API that can be employed either in the browser or on a server.

The Framework establishes the communication directly with the Ethereum node, and all the calls are tested to work on all the Ethereum nodes as well as MetaMask.
All the errors that we've found during development are tackled successfully within the Framework and developers don't even encounter them. And as soon as Solidity starts supporting error handling, the Framework will include that, too.
All the contracts are pre-written, audited, and packed into a single line of code for deployment.

There is an opinionated Framework made for application developers and supports two officially approved standards and hence two types of assets: the ERC-20 standard for fungible tokens (currencies) and the ERC-721 standard for non-fungible tokens (assets). This means you can use the Framework to create dapps for the financial sector (currency) or the industry (assets) - or both.

Another powerful and unique part of the Framework is the certification layer, an innovative Merkle tree algorithm that enables selective verification of data of any JSON Schema format.

And the best part? It's open-source and free for the developer community to bring dapp development to a whole new level.

Dapp.com 2018 Dapp Market Report

Dapp.com — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 05:32:48 +0000

Some highlights:

2018 was the first year of the “dapp movement”, although the cryptocurrency market was bumpy, the entire dapp market was flourishing and it contributed $6.7 billion throughout 2018. A fun fact - compared to 2009, the year Apple opened its App Store, there were over 65,000 mobile apps built on iOS and generated $4.2 billion in revenue.
In 2018, DEX is the core contributor to the dapp market with almost 40% of the total transaction volume. Cryptocurrency trading was still in high demand and decentralized exchanges had proven to be one successful use cases of dapps.
Betting dapps took over the dominating role in the market since Q4 last year. There was a total transaction volume of almost $3 billion in Q4, almost 44% of the total volume in 2018. Betting has become the “killer apps” on blockchain due to proven fairness. The booming betting dapp market was mainly contributed by EOS and TRON, the two high-speed DPoS blockchains built for decentralized apps.
The number of blockchain gaming dapps was still leading with a large proportion of 35%, following by pyramid (20%) and betting (around 20%). Overall, the dapp market is still driven by entertainment and gambling.

You can read the full report here - https://www.dapp.com/article/annual-dapp-market-report-2018

Let us know your feedback and thoughts!

Can We Finally Stop Talking About “DAU”?

Dapp.com — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 11:39:52 +0000

Decentralized applications (dapps) have gained significant attention from the public since Q3 2017. According to our Q3 2018 Dapp Market Report, dapp users have risen from less than 20,000 in June 2017 to over 950,000 by September 2018. The Ethereum dapps had a good run in the first 3 quarters in 2018 with a total transaction volume of over US$ 2 billion worth of ETH. Although the industry is still in its early stages, it demonstrates the potential of being a market with hundreds of billions of dollars.

We are witnessing the massive landing of dapps here.

However, how to determine whether a dapp project is good or not? Most of the people consider only daily active users (DAU) as the sole measure of the excellence of a dapp. Yet in many cases, it can be inaccurate and misleading. Therefore, we would like to take this opportunity to introduce you a more scientific way of evaluating dapps — Dapp.com Ranking 2.2.1 — and explain how it works.

Why “DAU” Is Misleading?

First, let’s start with the definition of DAU.
Daily active users (DAU) is a way of gauging the success of an internet product such as a social networking service, online game, or mobile app. It calculates the number of users visited or interacted with an internet product or service on a single given day.”[1] “Usually the only requirement for a product user to be considered “active” is that they somehow view the product or engage with the product.”[2]

Introducing DIU
The DAU data is recorded in the product backend that only operators can get access to. Some website traffic measurement tools such as Alexa and SimilarWeb provide estimated data, which oftentimes is missing and incomplete. For most dapp data sites, they measure a dapp’s DAU via monitoring its contract address to find out the number of transaction. The number here is usually referring to “DAU”. Dapp.com ranking, however, takes one step deeper and looks at the unique wallet addresses that interact with the contract on the blockchain. The data extracted according to this criteria, instead of calling it DAU, we’d like to call it DIU — Daily Interactive Users.

Then why do we use DIU instead of DAU?
Users who have logged into or browse the product are counted as DAU, but only those who have interactions with the blockchain are DIU. For example, a dapp game ABC might have 10,000 DAU, but those people just explore the marketplace with zero purchase and transaction activity, then they are not DIU.

Is DIU Important?

Back in 2017, Crypto collectibles were quite popular and we call those dapps “Hot Potato Game” — buy items at low prices and flip at higher prices later. Then many idle games and Ponzi schemes launched in 2018. The daily participated users number became the one and only index — just to make sure a large number of new participants join the game every day to be able to secure higher dividends. A lot of investors studied the game mechanism and the DIU stats to decide whether to invest in newly launched crypto collectibles or other dapps with investment attributes. So people refer to DIU (previously called DAU) as the sole criteria for evaluating a dapp.

We all know that transparency is the key feature of a dapp, and every single detail of wallet addresses (accounts) interact with the smart contracts are recorded on the blockchain. However, people still find a way to cheat and here’s how: That dapp game ABC has 1 user with 1 ETH of transaction volume when that 1 ETH was transferred from an address to the smart contract. But it also could be 100 users have only 1 ETH of total transaction volume if that 1 ETH was split into 100 different wallets and transferred to smart contracts. (Think of this way, 1 apple pie for 1 person vs. 1 apple pie for 100 people.)

Also, some people even build services to provide higher “DAU” (actually DIU) for dapps to get on the top ranking on websites like DappRadar. One site called EOS DAU, which can help dapps create huge amounts of EOS accounts to interact with its contracts and be able to list on the top 3.

So, is DIU really important? Yes, but DIU is NOT the sole criteria for dapps.

How to Identify a Good Dapp?

Well, it is a daunting challenge to pick a good dapp. We at Dapp.com have been researching and analyzing thousands of dapps over the last year. And here are some key metrics that we believe you should look into:

Daily Interactive Users (DIU): The number of accounts (users) that interact with the dapp’s smart contracts.
Quality of Users: There’s a huge difference between a user with 0.01 ETH in the account and the one 100 ETH in the account, and we consider the one with 100 ETH is a high-quality user.
Transaction Amount: It includes non-zero transactions (usually purchases) and zero transactions (actions).
Funding Sources of User Accounts: It purges bots and fake users whose funds are from the dapp’s contracts through multiple transfers.
User’s Attention: If a user account has 5 out of 10 contract-related activities with a dapp in one day, we consider he/she has high attention to this dapp.
Timeliness of User Actions: If a user’s last contribution to a dapp was a few months ago, then his/her recent action(s) to the dapp should reflect differences in its dapp ranking.
Community: It includes the community size and activeness. A community is formed by its loyal supporters and users who join the entire journey, from the dapp development to the expansion. It not only shows the potential to grow but also reflects the team’s capability of operations.

Dapp.com Ranking covers all the 7 key metrics in our algorithm and we’ve also added the community data in the new version 2.2.1. The higher the ranking score, the better the dapp is. Also, the growing tendency of the ranking score reflects the potential of a dapp.

In a nutshell, the new Dapp.com Ranking considers the contract performance, user quality, and community performance. Since the Dapp.com Ranking is a linearly cumulative continuous function that decays exponentially over time, the ranking scores are continuously distributed from 0–100. The following scale can be used as references:

Ranking score 80–100: Top tier dapp. It has a solid user base and “high-quality” users, as well as an active community with high engagement.
Ranking score 60–80: Good dapp. It means the current dapp status is generally healthy. There may be differences in the scale of effective user transaction and community activity compared to higher-score dapps.
Ranking score below 60: The dapp may have just released or currently still under development of major functions. Its user base and the number of valid transactions are relatively small. And also the community development is in an early stage. It might be risky sometime when the dapp is categorized as betting or built as Ponzi scheme.

Dapp.com Ranking has its limit too — it can only reflect the current status of the project, yet factors such as the growing tendency of the dapp should be considered into the grading system, too. But as for now, we hope it can help you cut through the noise and evaluate dapp more precisely, and we will continue upgrading along with the growth of the industry.

We will make Dapp.com Ranking open-source at the right time, eventually, we will invite our dapp community to participate and contribute in the near future.

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[1] Henry, Theresa F., et al. “Socially awkward: social media companies’ nonfinancial metrics can send a mixed message.” Journal of Accountancy, Sept. 2014, p. 52+. Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A381838689/ITBC?u=clackamasccl&sid=ITBC&xid=81e00621. Accessed 25 Oct. 2018.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_active_users#cite_note-1

[2] Seif El-Nasr, Magy; Drachen, Anders; Canossa, Alessandro (March 30, 2013). Game Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Player Data. Springer. pp. 56–57. ISBN 978–1–4471–4769–5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_active_users#cite_note-2

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Original post on https://www.dapp.com/article/can-we-finally-stop-talking-about-dau

STEEM Dapps Are Ready for Mass Adoption

Dapp.com — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 08:01:56 +0000

Hey Dapp Community, Happy New Year! We have an announcement to make and there’s no better way to kick off the new year than this one - Dapp.com is supporting dapps that built on STEEM blockchain!

But first of all, why STEEM?

Many people in the blockchain space may have known Steemit - one of the most well-known decentralized applications. As the first app built on STEEM, Steemit is widely used and recognized dapp. However, a lot of people mislabel STEEM blockchain as a decentralized “blogging platform”.

Meanwhile, STEEM has already created a well-established ecosystem to build decentralized apps by their developer community and large user base. On the one hand, many decentralized social media products that users are familiar with but only better with given rewards to users, so STEEM dapps are no stranger to most people; on the other hand, there’re entertainments like blockchain gaming, which provides excellent user experiences.

STEEM dapps have everything that we’ve been looking for in our next killer dapps - easy to access, gas-free, good user experience, and user incentives. We want to let the whole world RE-RECOGNIZE STEEM through the vast community of Dapp.com.

Hats off to our special guests therealwolf from Steem Apps and Matt from Steem Monsters. With their help, we have completed the data crawling and setup. You can now check out STEEM dapps and their data by visiting Dapp.com Ranking. And also don’t forget to write a review for your favorite dapp!

A Quick Steemians Starter Kit

To show our appreciation to the community, we’ve prepared a quick review of our experience with some STEEM dapps. But before we get started, you’ll need a STEEM account - here's how:

Account

You can have a free STEEM account by signing up for free on Steemit, which requires a 1-2 week of queueing. Or pay to sign up for instant access via BlockTrades or AnonSteem with a small amount of Bitcoin or Ether (it will be less than a cup of cappuccino!). QuickSteem is a Dapp.com’s recommended tool for instant account setup built by BuildTeam with its outstanding UX.

Wallet/Account Tools

SteemConnects: SteemConnect is an identity layer on top of the STEEM blockchain that makes accounts secure.

Steem Keychain: Steem Keychain is an extension for accessing STEEM-enabled distributed applications, or "Dapps" in your normal Chrome browser! For those who familiar with MetaMask, you will find Keychain super easy to use when interacting with the STEEM blockchain.

Block Explorer

Steemd.com - A block explorer of STEEM to explore and search the STEEM blockchain for transactions, accounts, and other activities, like Etherscan on Ethereum.

Tokens

You don’t actually need any tokens to access to STEEM dapps as the transactions don’t involve with any gas fees. But you will still get a small amount of STEEM tokens in your wallet after setup. In addition, you will be able to earn your STEEM tokens by contributing great contents on the STEEM apps.

Thriving on STEEM

Well then let’s take a sneak peek into some of the great STEEM dapps that listed on Dapp.com:

Steemit by Ned (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/steemit)
We assume everyone in the blockchain space know about Steemit, a community where users are rewarded for sharing their voice. We have been sharing our contents and stories with the STEEM community ever since we launched. We just can’t tell you how much we love their work!
dMania by Zombee (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/dmania)
The 9GAG on STEEM. Users can post memes, funny pictures, gifs, and get rewards in an easy and user-friendly way.
Steemblr by Snwolak (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/steemblr)
An open source microblogging platform powered by STEEM. It’s like Tumblr on the blockchain.
Musing by Jonching (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/musing)
Musing is a question and answer platform where you earn cryptocurrency on your content. Content is stored on the blockchain where you then "mine" tokens when you get upvotes. We answered a few questions there and earned some STEEM token within a few hours. The clean design and ad-free give better user experience than Quora. The team is working hard on fighting spam by detecting plagiarized content. The Musing users are active and their community is expanding. Definitely worth exploring.
Steem Monsters by Matt (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/steem-monsters)
The game was released last year and it's the best blockchain game of the year without any doubt. (Just so you know, we’ve played more than 50 games already). Full gameplay, actions are smooth, great design, rare digital assets etc - what a great combination of blockchain and games! We can’t tell how surprising did we feel when started exploring the game.
Magic Dice by magicdice (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/magic-dice)
When everyone is having so much fun betting on EOS dapps, Magic Dice gives an even better experience. The STEEM blockchain is as fast as the EOS blockchain and it doesn’t restrict by the CPU and RAM resources.
Steepshot by steepshot (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/steepshot)
The Instagram on blockchain. Steepshot is a platform that rewards people for sharing their lifestyle and visual experience.
1Ramp by the1ramp (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/1ramp)
A STEEM blockchain powered social media that rewards you for sharing your valuable work with the community. Both web and mobile version are available.
DTube by dtube (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/DTube)
The decentralized version of YouTube. With a lot of contents been uploaded and voted by the active community.
SteemHunt by tabris (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/steemhunt)
A STEEM fueled Product Hunt. Users can surface new products, upvote, and comment on them, and most importantly, they will be rewarded with STEEM tokens for contributions. The product design is super awesome. You can find Dapp.com there too.
Partiko by partiko and crypto.talk (https://www.dapp.com/dapp/partiko)
Yet another “blogging” platform on STEEM or blockchain in general, Partiko is slightly different. Partiko is a mobile app built on the STEEM blockchain, which allows you to interact with your fellow steemians on the go. Partiko’s ultimate vision is to enable the mass adoption of cryptocurrency by building crypto-based products like Partiko that seamlessly interact with users. With Partiko you also can get the rewards from everyday check-in, which is pretty cool.

Again, a round of applause to the STEEM community for the greatest support. Many more STEEM dapps are definitely under the radar. For those STEEM dapps that haven’t listed on Dapp.com yet, please submit to us and we can’t wait to share your products!

What are Smart Contracts?

Dapp.com — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 06:42:34 +0000

Smart Contracts are incredible lines of code that make dapps possible; without them there would be no cryptocurrency or interesting applications to run. Smart Contracts have truly come a long way from their original function, behaving as a proxy for transactions, and pushing the capabilities of blockchain technology ever higher. During our research into Smart Contracts, we came across the original inventor Nick Szabo, who, to make things more interesting, is believed to be the person behind “Satoshi Nakamoto” (the pseudonym used by the creator/s of Bitcoin) or part of its team. The American cryptographer developed the concept back in 1998 with his very own cryptocurrency called "Bit Gold," putting into practice Smart Contracts which he had first proposed in 1994 as a solution to eliminate middlemen for transactions and thereby creating a secure network for the currency to be used. His papers not only seemed to predict everything that we saw put into practice ten years later with the release of Bitcoin but in them, we also saw some of his ideas being outright implemented.

We are however digressing; what we want to do is explain how Smart Contracts work and look at other functions this ingenious method of coding has to offer. Whether or not Nick Szabo is indeed Satoshi Nakamoto is for you to look into. Smart Contracts, however, are undoubtedly the brainchild of Szabo, whom we should thank for this exciting technology we use today.

How Smart Contracts Work

Smart Contracts in the simplest of terms are self-executing contracts for simple transactions between a buyer and a seller. The details of the simplest function that a Smart Contract can have is as follows: it can only confirm that the seller is selling an item for a certain amount and that the buyer is willing and able to pay that amount inside the code which needs to be validated by the decentralized ledger on the blockchain network. Once the request for the purchase is made, the Smart Contract goes forth and confirms that all the criteria are met. In the case that the criteria are met, the transaction can proceed smoothly. If there is an issue, the valuables in question for the transaction will be returned to their original owners. In both cases, the decentralized ledger will update the current values that the buyer or the seller own. Every single transaction is recorded in an updated ledger that confirms that individual operations occurred on a specific date, for a particular amount, and between two specific accounts, thereby creating a blockchain that is both “transparent” and “trustworthy.”

Smart Contracts need to first be coded flawlessly and then inserted inside the blockchain to make the Smart Contract’s function valid. Once the code is written, validated, and stored within the decentralized ledger, everyone on the network can directly call the function to help make a transaction. Everyone has access to this function but nobody is able to alter it, which makes blockchain technology a trustworthy solution for all kinds of operations and establishes its all-important “incorruptible” nature.

Ethereum’s Smart Contract

What we just described is the Smart Contract for Bitcoin, which was designed to keep a detailed record of who owns what or to be used as a currency that eliminates the need for third-parties (like banks and governments) when moving large amounts of money.

Ethereum, on the other hand, was explicitly designed with the purpose of using Smart Contracts differently. The creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, adapted blockchain in a way geared to allow developers to add functions in the Smart Contract that supported their (the developers’) various needs. Coding a Smart Contract was very difficult as the Ethereum network reads them in Bytecode or, simply put, in ones and zeros. To make it easier for developers to create ever more complex Smart Contracts, the programming language "Solidity" was created by Buterin. Developers using Solidity, which is similar to JavaScript, now had the means to design their Smart Contracts in the way they wanted.

With these capabilities, Ethereum became a Virtual Machine that could essentially provide functions that can run software, websites, and apps on the decentralized Ethereum network. Ultimately, the goal of Ethereum is to reach "Turing Completeness," which in this case means being able to simulate the capabilities of a computer on the decentralized Ethereum network.

Applying its Capability

If you want to try out Ethereum's capabilities, do check out the dapps on our website. Most interesting is the manner in which Smart Contracts may be applied to areas related specifically to bureaucratically-centered institutions. Another application concerns your personal bureaucratic documents—from your birth certificate to your driving license. Imagine if every single legal document pertaining to you was stored in a decentralized network and that if you needed a copy of any of them all you had to do was send a request after confirming your identity, whereupon you would be getting the requested document instantly. Such a system would speed up otherwise very slow and cumbersome processes.

Taking this a step further would be to code the Smart Contract to automatically update all legal documents when buying a house, getting insurance, or when paying your taxes. Since everything from transactions to ownership is transparent and incorruptible, this would reduce tax evasion and smoothly create a more effortless way of living and governing.

Even Amazon, for instance, could potentially get in on this by automating everything and using Smart Contracts. Smart Contracts would ensure that the transaction was made, the item was sent from the warehouse, and guarantee the package had arrived at its destination. It might sound like science fiction, but Amazon is already using drones for maintaining warehouse stock and even for deliveries.

Interesting Future Ahead

Smart Contracts can be an incredible force for change in our society. They have already shown their enormous capabilities and advantages. Ethereum has great potential to create an even more astonishing future, especially if it succeeds in achieving Turing Completeness, where everything is decentralized and can be run on a decentralized network.

It will, however, be a challenge to implement other supporting applications to change how most institutions work and process documents. It is very rare to see well-established institutions (legal or governmental) adopt innovative and avant-garde technology. Consequently, private companies are likely to lead the charge in testing the waters, implementing blockchain technology, creating a decentralized network, and developing Smart Contracts for their specific needs.

Eventually, there is a strong probability that Smart Contracts will be applied to make our future better. Whether it is Ethereum or some other Blockchain remains to be seen.

Originally posted on https://www.dapp.com/article/what-are-smart-contracts