Characters from the My Crypto Heroes game. Source: a video screenshot, My Crypto Heroes

A new report from DappRadar, a dapp data aggregator, claims that Ethereum (ETH) is now leading the field in blockchain gaming, with both EOS (EOS) and Tron (TRX) “falling away” in 2019, despite the merits of both competitor platforms.

The report’s authors claim that growth in the Ethereum dapp (decentralized application) ecosystem has been spurred by a wider upward trend in the gaming sector – one that EOS and Tron have benefited less from.

They write,

“2019 has witnessed Ethereum reinforce its primary position for blockchain gaming as the challenge of seemingly more capable blockchains such as EOS and Tron has fallen away.”

And despite the spike in user activity, monetization is still an issue, per the report, which notes that only a few game operators use their own ERC20 tokens, with most making use of tradable non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Also, as the Ethereum blockchain is a popular means for gaming dapps developers to create NFT marketplaces, “in the vast majority of cases, we’re not talking about entire games running on the blockchain.”

In either case, mention was made of the game title My Crypto Heroes, which charges users ETH 0.1 (USD 12) a month for its VIP Prime subscription services. The game had but a few hundred players in January, rising to “well over 3,500” by the end of the year and is the only dapp in any category to sustain an audience of more than 1,000 daily active wallets.

There was more good news for Ethereum in the report, which stated that the blockchain platform “remains the only blockchain to-date that’s successfully nurtured dapps across four categories: Decentralized finance (DeFi), Exchanges, Games and Gambling and High-risk.”

The authors claim that daily active unique wallets in the Ethereum dapp ecosystem rose 118% this year, reaching over 19,000 by mid-December.

They also noted that:

DeFi has the smallest user base with the highest value

Exchanges are more widely used with less daily value, while

Games/Marketplaces and Gambling/High-Risk generate insignificant value despite their much higher daily activity

In comparison, daily activity for EOS dapps rose in the first half of the year, peaking at 54,000 daily active unique wallets across all dapps in early June. "And while activity on the EOS dapp ecosystem sustained around 40,000 daily wallets for most of the year, the launch of the EIDOS token - at best a mischievous experiment gone wrong, at worst an aggressive DDOS attack - meant that by December it was below 15,000," according to DappRadar. Meanwhile, in April, the total number of daily active unique wallets interacting with Tron dapps peaked at over 30,000 and then dropped to an average of 17,500 by the end of the year.

But Ethereum enthusiasts may want to heed a few words of warning from the report before celebrating.

The authors state that ERC20 tokens – rather than Ethereum tokens – are responsible for “the majority of value being generated” on the Ethereum blockchain.

And the lucrative gambling dapps market also looks to be out of reach for Ethereum – at least for the time being.

DappRadar states,

“Although Ethereum was the first blockchain that gambling dapps and (their associated, more complex brothers) high-risk dapps could use, it’s now clear Ethereum is not a natural platform for such activities.”

The reasons for this, per the report, are slower block times, as well as Ethereum’s business model, which involves charging a gas fee for every transition. (Learn more: Ethereum-Based Crypto-Games Fall under ‘Gambling’ - Study)

The report concludes by stating that although 2019 failed to live up to commentators’ (admittedly high) expectations for Ethereum, the blockchain could claim some degree of accomplishment, pointing to “the successful deployment of two hard forks and symbolic events such as the Flippening” as evidence of “its growing maturing as a functional technology.” However, as reported yesterday, Ethereum is now forced to have another hard fork in January due to a mistake made during the previous hard fork.