The majority of blockchain DApps, including EOS, are clunky, slow, and struggling to attract users. Now, according to a shocking report by AnChain, they’re also rife with bot traffic.
Blockchain DApps Struggling to Attract Users
The vast majority of blockchain DApps are struggling to consolidate a user base. Decentralized exchanges suffer from lack of liquidity, a poor user experience, and high latency.
Most gambling DApps fail to offer a more attractive value prop than a regular smartphone app, and gaming DApps lack a compelling enough reason for users to take the extra steps. CryptoKitties may have been novel at first. But the buzz around decentralized collectible felines quickly faded.
On February 11, 2019, 93 percent of Ethereum DApps did zero transactions. These are not very encouraging results for the case of mass adoption. And it’s a lot worse than we thought.
According to a blockchain bot report released by blockchain security firm AnChain, most of the dismal stats churned out by DApps aren’t even coming from real people.
AnChain Finds Bot Activity Is ‘Rampant’ in EOS DApps
AnChain uses AI to detect any suspicious activity among blockchain DApps and to monitor transactions. In what is the largest study of blockchain DApps and bot activity to date, the intelligence firm analyzed “millions of transactions” from the Top 10 EOS gambling DApps.
Gambling DApps on EOS make up the majority of all transaction volume, accounting for around 65 percent. What they found was disturbing.
In the first quarter of 2019, blockchain bots made up 51 percent of unique accounts–and more than 75 percent of transactions! As the report states:
In other words, every day the equivalence of $6 million USD in transaction volume is driven by bad bots.
Good and Bad News for Ethereum as EOS on the Chopping Block
The good news for Ethereum is that its DApps aren’t mentioned in this report. The bad news is that they weren’t studied by AnChain as:
EOS is the #1 DApp blockchain with $480 million in weekly transaction volume.
To be fair, Etherum still has more DApps than any other platform. The only problem is that most of them have low-to-no adoption.
All but one of EOS’ top performing DApps are gambling related and bot-driven. So, what does this mean, if anything, to the crypto space at large?
Rather like Bitwise reporting that 95 percent of trading volume is fake on cryptocurrency exchanges, if the growing number of DApps is a metric to measure blockchain adoption, then it can’t be trusted since it’s being manipulated by interested parties.
This could be to boost DApp rankings through bot transactions, increase the liquidity of DApp utility tokens, earn profits on payout dividends or even sabotage competing DApps by congesting them with traffic.
In short? It turns out it wasn’t just a suspicion or bias. Blockchain DApps are in fact more useless than we thought.
What do you think about DApps? Do they have any use in the real world? Share your thoughts below!
Images via Shutterstock
