Dapp.com—Research Report
As it currently stands, Dapp.com is the world’s largest decentralized application (‘dApp’) distribution platform. The website has over 2,400 dApps built across seven different blockchains available on their platform.
This is not just a website, but a data-driven dApp aggregator.
In this report, we will unpack the Dapp.com project and discuss their vision to build a new ecosystem for the decentralized world.
Background on the dApp market
Firstly, let us clarify what exactly a dApp is in essence. A dApp is similar to a regular application that we are used to in the digital world, however rather than being run and maintained on a single computer or server, the application is run over a distributed network. The way that users and data interact with dApps is all open and public for all to see and analyse.
They bring a new degree of openness and decentralization to the apps we are used to using and interacting with on a day-to-day basis.
The dApp market is arguably still in its infancy stage. The market is emerging and more developers are building and designing decentralized apps as the months go by.
In 2017, we really saw the first pioneer of the dApp success story in CryptoKitties, which was and is essentially a marketplace game to buy and sell digital collectible cats.
This showed that there is a valid use-case available for gaming dApps aside from the majority gambling and exchange use-cases that we see at this time.
This also showed us one of the first implementations of a successful use of non-fungible tokens (‘NFTs’) in a blockchain game. Introducing the concept of secure and scarce tokens. An idea that is catching on now, in 2019, with more companies looking to build and design games and even projects (see ‘Ecomi’) around the digital collectible space.
Aside from games, there have been successful implementations of decentralized applications such as IDEX (cryptocurrency exchange based on Ethereum), Steemit (decentralized social media concept), and of course many, many betting and gambling games.
With that in mind, Dapp.com aim to provide a platform for legitimate and data-vetted dApps and improve on some of the core pain-points that users experience now in interacting with them.
Problem
To understand the benefits of what Dapp.com are proposing, it’s important to understand the current environment around dApps and what is lacking at this time.
1. Access
During 2018, we saw startup after startup coming out with their plans to improve on the current blockchain model and be the ‘best of the best’ on offer. Cost, latency and especially scalability have been the three core tenets common across countless blockchain startups and even layer 2 scalability projects.
What we have at the moment, are many, many blockchains competing for superiority. The truth is, they are often very similar, distinguishable merely by consensus model or theoretical throughput values.
The difficulty here lies in the isolation between different blockchains, their developers and ultimately users. This has resulted in what is a very fragmented ecosystem of blockchains and dApps.
2. Lacklustre UX
It is widely known that a mere fraction of the user-base of Ethereum and other large blockchain networks have actually actively used or interacted with dApps.
We think it is fair to say that this is influenced largely (among other factors) to extremely poor user-experience, and the Dapp.com team agree.
As a user at this stage, and in contrasting traditional apps to the new-age dApps… it is clear to see why dApps are not yet reaching truly meaningful adoption.
Setting up wallets, managing keys, managing tokens and fees. These all combine into a significant deterrence to user-adoption.
3. A fragmented market
As highlighted earlier, the market is significantly fragmented and isolated. It is also rife with bad-actors creating predatory and unfair dApps to prey on unsuspecting users.
Dapp.com argues that for the dApp market to begin to grow and mature, there must be some oversight into which dApps can be trusted and promoted. This is addressed in their platform, which we will get to.
Solution
Dapp.com wants to remove some of the barriers to adoption for dApps, making it easier for users to interact with them, and in a way that is simple to understand even for the blockchain-amateur.
Currently, the platform is live and aggregates over 2,400 dApps in the one place. For ease of use and discovery.
However, it is not just a simple aggregator. The team have larger plans.
Dapp Store Wallet
The first component of the Dapp.com solution moving forward involves a new tool called the Dapp Store Wallet (‘DSW’).
This is primarily designed to remove barriers in accessing the world of dApps. It will be somewhat of a unified wallet comprised of wallet accounts for many different blockchains all in the one place.
Kyle Lu, CEO of Dapp.com, spoke about this concept in our recent Telegram AMA on June 6th.
“The whole idea is to create easy access to all different dApps. We need to bring users to use dApps in order to improve dApps. Let’s recap the user flow of using dApps nowadays — learn about the address, private keys, seed phrases, open wallet, install MetaMask, pay gas fees, and repeat again for another blockchain.
If we ask crypto traders to learn all these processes, then the crypto industry will be 100 times smaller than it is now.
The Dapp Store Wallet is there to get rid of all these learning processes — a user only needs to create an account on Dapp.com, and we have already setup all the different wallets for them — Ethereum, EOS, TRON, etc.
They only need to have our token or transfer tokens into the account to explore dApps from different blockchains. Just like you don’t need to learn about different blockchains to trade in Binance.” — Kyle Lu
Multi-Blockchain Identity Network
The gist of the Multi-Blockchain Identity Network (‘MIN’) is to allow users to manage different wallets from multiple blockchains with just one single passphrase.
Again, Kyle spoke on this recently.
“Simply put this [Multi-Blockchain Identity Network] is a decentralized tool for users to create and manage their private keys of different wallet addresses easily. To be able to use one set of passwords to create mapping with different wallets. This would be an important element of our decentralized store in the future (phase 2 development).” — Kyle Lu
Cross-Chain Dapp SDK
The team intend to create an SDK (software development kit) for developers wanting to build dApps across different blockchains. We have reviewed the description of this concept in the whitepaper, and had questions for the team surrounding this.
Our concern, while it sounded good at the surface, was around whether or not the dApps could interact or if there would be isolated iterations of the same dApp where users on different blockchains couldn’t interact. Essentially creating more fragmentation rather than reducing and consolidating it.
Kyle Lu responded with, “The interaction on each blockchain will be isolated. Our goal is to highly reduce the cost of learning for developers. Imagine the developer building on both ETH and EOS. They need to learn twice and double the amount of their work on the codes. We build all different elements that is compatible with different blockchains so that they can move around easy.”
Market Intelligence
As mentioned, the platform is data-driven and a lot of data is collected by the team about different dApps, usage statistics and more. This is a lesser point in the grand scheme of things, however it will be interesting to analyse and visualize dApp data as the market grows.
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Kyle made mention that this will be launched in the coming week.
Dapp Analytics
Different to the market intelligence component, Dapp Analytics will be targeted to the developer side of the equation. This tool will give developers data and insight into behaviour and trends for their dApps.
Revenue Model
The team have thought through several revenue streams attributable to the platform. The main of these will be from marketing and distribution of dApps. The team have noted in their whitepaper that they are still in the early stages of the business and are thinking through the best way to structure their revenue model.
Revenue streams identified:
- dApp promotion (advertising)
- dApp distribution (referral fees)
- Launchpad (fundraising; fee based)
- Data services (bespoke data services and consulting)
We were most curious about the ‘Launchpad’ concept and asked Kyle for some more information.
“It could be a lot of ways. It could be open beta, presale, auctions, IIO (initial item offerings, for games). A lot of dApps do not have tokens to sell but they need to boost their awareness or kickstart their business.
That’s what the launchpad concept is for.
Advertisements/marketing services, listing fees, blockchain integration fees, data fees, and we could also adopt the Costco model — subscription fees for users. They can get early access for new launch or sale and have discounts etc.” — Kyle Lu
Partners & Investors
Token
This startup is in the midst of raising funds for a new utility token called ‘DAPPT’ — the Dapp Token. It is an ERC-20 token, with a total supply of 5b.
It’s utility and value is described in the whitepaper as including:
- Used for payment of platform service fees. Users can receive a discount when using DAPPT tokens for payment within the platform (BNB model);
- Used for voting power in ‘community voting’ rounds where dApps can receive promotion on the platform;
- As a stake for dApp projects/developers wanting to launch and be listed on the Dapp.com platform;
- For use in partner dApps;
- As payment for cross-chain asset deployment
Bonuses are being offered in all rounds of the token sale. For more detail, see the whitepaper.
There is also mention of another token called ‘DCM’. Kyle Lu has elaborated that this token represents a one-week promotion package on dapp.com. DCM tokens are acquired through a bonus from the private sale, as confirmed in our talks with Kyle Lu.
Team
Kyle Lu [CEO]
Kyle is an entrepreneur and former Partner and VP of Global Business at Achain. Previously worked with Achain to incubate dApps.
Eric Jiang [CTO]
Master’s degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University. Eric has been involved in the blockchain and dApp space for several years, working with the Ethereum, Nebulas and EOS blockchains.
Jun Gong [COO]
Jun as a background in accounting and finance. Prior to Dapp.com, Jun was the business operations lead for Asia at startup SMART VALOR, a blockchain fintech company based in Switzerland.
Roadmap
- Q2 2019: Token sale, complete development of DSW beta, integrate Market Intelligence functionality
- Q3 2019: DSW able to support Ethereum, Dapp Launchpad ready
- Q4 2019: DSW to support another blockchain protocol, Dapp Analytics services available
- Q1 2020: Launch of MIN
- Q2 2020: Launch of Cross-Chain Dapp Development SDK
Summary
Dapp.com is already at the forefront of the dApp aggregation space. We have compared them to the CoinMarketCap of dApps.
The team have a vision to breakdown some of the key barriers to adoption of dApps which we appreciate. The dApp space is growing, and it seems now that Dapp.com is best positioned to be the one-stop-shop for everything decentralized applications now and in the future.
We will need to monitor their progress according to their roadmap.
Website
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This report was written using publicly available information. Thank you to the Dapp.com team for supporting our work and sponsoring this report.
