The cryptocurrency researcher Kevin Rooke has stirred some controversy with a recent tweet, claiming that Ethereum and EOS combined only sport a total of 8 decentralized applications (dApps) with more than 300 daily users.

Rooke’s data was compiled using DappRadar, and he found that Ethereum flaunts five dApps with more than 300 daily users, whilst EOS only has three apps with over 300 users.

Despite this seeming lack of dApp adoption, however, both Ethereum and EOS sport multi-billion dollar market valuations – with Ethereum currently at an approximate market valuation of a whopping $28 billion, and EOS holding a market capitalization of $4.6 billion.

Interestingly, although EOS is far newer than Ethereum and holds a significantly lower market valuation, EOS’ most popular dApp has a far higher weekly transaction volume than Ethereum’s leading dApp.

More specifically, the decentralized gambling platform EOSBet Casino reportedly transacts $18.1 million a week, whilst the Ethereum-based decentralized exchange IDEX transacts a comparatively modest $7.3 million.

It should also be noted that EOS has currently been live for less than three months, and Ethereum has been live for over three years. Nevertheless, this seemingly low number of dApps with more than 300 daily users may not be important.

The absence of notable dApp activity is sometimes chalked up to the nascent dApp industry, poor dApp user interfaces, as well as that the general public is still largely unaware of the concept of decentralized applications.

Moreover, last year saw Fred Ehrsam, Coinbase co-founder, stress that Ethereum would need to scale by a factor of a hundred to be able to handle major dApps with millions of users on its network.

However, solutions for this are arguably being developed faster than dApps seem to grow in adoption, with Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin noting that scaling solutions such as Sharing and Plasma could drastically increase the capacity of the Ethereum network.

At the moment, however, Martin Koppelman – creator of Gnosis – has argued that the active user base of dApps is not the most important metric. Rather, Koppelman notes, the most critical parameter is the interconnectedness of dApps and their network effect.

In summary, it would not seem as if Rooke’s finding is a major problem for the future adoption of dApps. In addition to this, a lack of adoption cannot either be attributed to scalability issues.

It would instead seem that the popularity of dApps still hinges on developers’ ability to create compelling dApps, which are as easy to use as centralized platforms. Until then, general dApp adoption can very well drag on.

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