Understanding the State of Crypto with DappRadar

DappRadar is now the World’s Dapp Store, leading in all dapp analytics and discovery areas. The company has more than 40 blockchains, more than 10,000 dapps, and over 2,000 NFT collections, sending 1 million users to dapps every month.

Understanding the State of Crypto with DappRadar

Ishan Pandey: Hi Skirmantas, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind DappRadar?

Skirmantas Januškas: Founded by myself and Dragos Dunica over a weekend, DappRadar is now the World’s Dapp Store, leading in all areas of dapp analytics and discovery. Growing from two dedicated admirers of the decentralized world, DappRadar stands almost 60 pioneers deep, with headquarters in Lithuania and strategic outposts in the UK and China. DappRadar has grown tremendously over the last few years. But it all started from the needs of two young men looking for decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain.

There wasn’t anything central or in any kind of friendly list. But we kept hearing about these apps on the blockchain. There were only Reddit threads and tweets to look through. We found ourselves building the first iteration of DappRadar for ourselves. We just wanted to bring all the dapps on Ethereum into one place – then I shared it on my Reddit account. People were interested straight away as we had just made their lives much easier. That’s a premise that’s remained with DappRadar.

DappRadar launched on February 4, 2018, as a weekend project. It all started with just Ethereum and a handful of dapps. However, the EOS and Tron blockchains started expanding their dapp ecosystems in the following six to eight months. By the end of 2018, DappRadar had three blockchains integrated and a few hundred dapps.

At this point, the pair decided to focus all efforts on building a more extensive and comprehensive dapp tracking system, DappRadar. Furthermore, after a wild couple of years, the cryptocurrency markets cooled off, heading into a bear market situation for almost two years. Importantly, this is when we decided to get our heads down and build.

During that down market, many waves of different dapps trying to break out and get early adopters and cryptocurrency holders engaged. The situation played into the hands of dapps as many investors were now sitting on tokens they didn’t want to sell, looking for utility. Hot potato, game theory dapps, shrimp farms, roll the dice with dividend tokens style applications came and went as developers played with different ideas. It was so different from what it is today, and it’s incredible how far things have come in three years. It’s remarkable to be playing a part in that journey.

Ishan Pandey: Please tell us a little bit about DappRadar and the current market for decentralized applications in terms of yield?

Skirmantas Januškas: DappRadar has become The World’s Dapp Store and is blockchain and category agnostic, supporting more than 40 blockchains, more than 10,000 dapps, and over 2,000 NFT collections, sending 1 million visitors to dapps every month. These numbers are growing every month and the current market for dapps is buoyant with more users than ever.

Ishan Pandey: What new data trends are we seeing in the blockchain industry?

Skirmantas Januškas: The dapp market is currently in one of the most exciting places it’s ever been due to waves of more user-friendly crypto projects entering the space and ramping up dapp usage. The strongest trends can be seen in gaming and NFTs since around the third quarter of 2021 and persist today with more than half of all dapp usage in Q1 2022 coming from games, which represents a 2,000% increase from the previous year. More importantly, users are making a passive income from playing games and learning about DeFi mechanics.

NFTs brought about a shift in thinking in crypto as suddenly complex financial instruments came in the shape of visual avatars or images with arguably far more appeal to regular people. The NFT hype of 2021 doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, but investors have had a year or so to better understand the landscape and pick good projects that want to offer real utility and growth. Alongside this, we see the emergence of bigger players within the gaming and NFT space.

Companies like Yuga Lab’s acquisition of the CryptoPunks IP, the release of Moonbirds collection, the BAYC official token ApeCoin and rapid price appreciation of collections like Azuki point toward powerful cliques forming that will weird increasing amounts of influence and power in the crypto world as we move forward. In the world of gaming, Animoca Brands invests and builds in and with many different projects, all in the effort to make blockchain gaming mainstream.

Ishan Pandey: Web3 is an attempt to integrate blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized applications together, although its exact utility is difficult to determine. Please elaborate a little on your thoughts about Web 3.0?

Skirmantas Januškas: For me, it’s essential to keep in focus that Web3 refers to the next interpretation of the internet and focuses on decentralization and user ownership. The core vision is one of empowerment and financial independence. Moreover, it’s one of evolution for mankind. Your Web3 wallet is how you are identified, log in to applications, prove that you own things, and authorize something to happen. You can keep your wallet anonymous if you want to. The important thing is that you, and only you, control your wallet. More importantly, anybody with a device can use Web3. That’s why we say it’s permissionless. All you need is your Web3 wallet and enough currency in it to pay for the things you want to do.

Furthermore, the idea that some people have already been priced out of certain cryptocurrencies or NFT collections doesn’t have the same repercussions in Web3. In Web3 an individual or group can start their own project without the constraints of physical property or huge overheads. These days a 14-year-old can start the next billionaire boys club, and it’s happening.

Ishan Pandey: Solana’s blockchain has started to generate hefty revenue for its network due to its remarkable speed. Do you think Dapp developers will benefit from moving to Solana?

Skirmantas Januškas: DappRadar is blockchain agnostic, but of course, we see the unique propositions of each network. Solana’s stated mission is to support all high-growth and high-frequency dapps and to democratize the world’s financial systems. At its core, Solana offers scalability to dapps and is capable of supporting over 50,000 transactions per second. Furthermore, transaction costs on the network are estimated to cost approximately $10 for 1 million transactions. Based on these aspects, Solana is set up to deal with the majority of decentralized applications tracked by DappRadar from across various categories such as DeFi, Gaming, and NFTs.

Solana offers a great solution to dapp developers looking for scalability and speed so we are not surprised to see tremendous growth in both its dapp ecosystem and TVL figure. Platforms like Orca, Magic Eden, and Raydium are building strong user bases and continue to offer the services people want. However, Solana - like Ethereum - will not carry the crown alone. We believe in a multichain future where various blockchains attract an audience. More importantly, value and information will transfer swiftly and smoothly between these different blockchains, all while the regular consumer won’t notice anything about the complexities in the background.

Ishan Pandey: What are your views on NFTs and NFT collateralization?

Skirmantas Januškas: NFTs have been on our radar for years (pardon the pun), and Dragos and I started this journey with a solid idea that NFTs would revolutionize the industry through actual ownership. We pivoted hard in 2021 as a company to focus on the emerging asset class, and it paid off. We now have the most comprehensive NFT tracking in the space and are the go-to data provider for the world’s leading media outlets.

What we have seen emerge over the last 18 months has been incredible to observe as DappRadar, and as individuals - the birth of a new asset class with its audience and mechanics that seem to defy cryptocurrency market trends. More importantly, NFTs have brought investors into the space with a more visually appealing investment option that can provide further utility in metaverse platforms. The sky is the limit, but I think now it’s all about top collections delivering on promises made while new ones carefully consider that the audience for NFTs is now far savvier than it was just a year ago.

Instead of using a bank that would require a person to put up their home or car as collateral, people can now leverage their NFTs through specialized services that connect owners of digital art and collectibles NFTs with lenders. The main idea of NFT collateralization is to give people who potentially sunk considerable amounts of money into NFTs a way to release some equity without selling their digital assets. It also gives people a way to make a passive income on their investments through lending. Lenders are also attracted to using NFT collateralization services by the potential of charging rates that far exceed traditional loans. In theory, a lender could also take ownership of a valuable NFT if a borrower defaults.

Ishan Pandey: What are your views on GameFi and Play-2-Earn?

 Skirmantas Januškas: GameFi and Play-to-Earn gaming are developments at the forefront of what blockchain technology can do to enhance digital consumer experiences. Blockchain technology on its own already provides users with actual digital ownership, the ability to trade digital assets as if these are physical ones. While GameFi or gamified financial services provide a sense of entertainment to otherwise passive and arguably boring financial services, play-to-earn or play-and-earn gaming takes the most significant entertainment industry to another level.

Gamers spend around 8 hours and 27 minutes per week playing video games. That’s 442 hours per year. In the United States, gamers spend an average of $84 per year on in-game content, not counting regular game purchases. Game companies need these gamers, these communities, to build a fun experience for everybody. Yet, gamers spend time and money without getting anything in return. Play-to-earn gaming changes this and allows gamers to earn something from their time spent. It’s still early, but we at DappRadar see the revolution happening, embracing this new game paradigm.

Ishan Pandey: What does the roadmap ahead look like for DappRadar?

Skirmantas Januškas: Where the first quarter of 2022 was about laying the technical foundation for our road ahead, the second quarter will be about paving the way. The road ahead is an exciting one for DappRadar and our community. When we started the calendar year, we dedicated lots of time and development resources to improving our infrastructure. Profiles that first couldn’t load because they contained too many NFTs, now load within seconds. Not only did we optimize our servers, but we’ve also reduced the amount of data required to load visuals of NFTs. This has become a big win for our users, especially those with mobile data packages. Our efforts for optimization will never end, and this is just one example of how we improve our product.

In addition, we’re on a hiring spree! We’re growing our development and marketing teams in order to build better, faster, and communicate with our audience more clearly. At the same time, DappRadar is creating partnerships with some of the most promising blockchain protocols. We started tracking dapps on Optimism and Hedera, Moonbeam, Moonriver, Everscale, Algorand, KardiaChain, Cronos, Fantom, Oasis, and Shiden.

In 2022 we will transform our rankings and supercharge this key product with all kinds of new features. Think about more metrics, trending dapps, and tighter integration of the rankings into the portfolio and the dapp product pages. The DappRadar Rankings on steroids give users deeper insights while also integrating the product into the user experience throughout the website. We will also upgrade the dapp product pages. We will introduce special features tailored for gamers on these pages, hopefully helping those who are excited about play-to-earn gaming and GameFi.

We’re not only working on improving existing features, but we will also add new ones to DappRadar. Right now, you can find the latest NFT sales and the most popular NFT collections based on their trading volume, but we don’t offer a proper way to dive deeper into collections yet. This will change. Soon you can check out entire collections, jump into their metadata, and follow and analyze them. DappRadar will launch the NFT Collections Explorer to help you discover, analyze, and track.

What’s the cherry on the cake? We’re working on a native app for iOS and Android. In the app, users will be able to engage with the most popular and personal elements of the DappRadar website. The most interesting proposition here is that everything will be available for free, but users with a DappRadar PRO membership get enhanced and supercharged versions of our services. Anybody can become a PRO member, simply by holding 5,000 RADAR tokens in their wallet.

Ishan Pandey: What trends do you see in the funding scene for the blockchain industry?

Skirmantas Januškas: The amount of capital invested in blockchain games in Q1 is overperforming the $4 billion raised in 2021. In the first three months of 2022, VCs and investors have raked at least $2.5 billion into blockchain games and their underlying infrastructure. At this pace, play-to-earn and metaverse-related projects will add $10 billion this year to keep building the future of this industry.

In March 2022, over $785 million was invested across different projects. Yuga Labs, the studio behind the renowned NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), received a $450 million investment led by Animoca Brands, with The Sandbox, FTX, and Coinbase involved in the deal. The investment further cements the status of Yuga Labs as one of the names to follow in the Web3 narrative. It also boosts the team’s metaverse plans as they prepare for the launch of Otherside. Otherside will become an interoperable metaverse platform involving play-to-earn games, fashion, and media.

It is also worth highlighting the $200 million investment led by Temasek in Immutable-X (IMX). The investment brings the value of the Sidney-based Ethereum scaling solution to a $2.5 billion Series C valuation. IMX hosts two popular blockchain games in Gods Unchained and Guilds of Guardians. Furthermore, Gary V’s Book Games have already seen more than $100 million in NFT trading volume on Immutable X. These dapps will be joined by Illuvium and Ember Swordin the upcoming months. The capital raised will bring flexibility to keep building and scaling the IMX product further.

Investors see the bigger picture here. NFTs and gaming will pave the way for mainstream users to show interest in blockchain technology. At the same time, improved tech and better user experiences will make onboarding even easier.

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