It’s tempting to compare decentralized applications (DApps) to the Internet applications that were so pivotal to the Web’s mainstream adoption. LongHash previously wrote about how this year, the success of the DApp market rivalled the early days of Apple’s App Store, based on revenue volume.





By other calculations, however, DApps have a long way to go. We looked at the number of DApps that had ERC20 token transactions within 24 hours on February 1. We found that out of total of 1812 Ethereum DApps, based on StateoftheDApps data, ERC20 transactions were made on only 180 DApps.















However, when it comes to the number of transactions, i.e., frequency of usage, it becomes clear how far blockchain is from mainstream adoption. We analyzed the last 100 Ethereum DApps out of the aforementioned 180 to see the breakdown of transaction frequency, and found that only 13% of those DApps had more than 100,000 transactions per day, with a maximum number of around 200,000.











Low adoption holds true across different blockchains as well. It is worth noting here that only eight of the top 50 most popular DApps run on Ethereum, based on transaction volume. But even if we take DICE (a DApp on EOS) with around 450,000 transactions per day and compare this to the same numbers, the usage still appears virtually invisible when compared to Internet apps like Telegram or Whatsapp.





Apart from telling us that user adoption is slow for blockchain, this data also demonstrates that the focus on blockchain scalability may be excessive. Some teams are working to enable hundreds thousands of transactions per second, while the unfortunate truth is that many DApps do not even need that many transactions per day.





Diana Rees in the CEO of zkSystems.











