A while back, I’d read an offhand Reddit comment saying that most popular Dapps today were focused on gambling. As I didn’t know much about actual dapp popularity, I found State of the Dapps and did some browsing. Lo and behold, in the top 10 dapps today by DAUs, I found 5 gambling apps, 3 games, 1 social app, and 1 finance-related app. (A quick peek at Dapp Radar shows a similar story.)



Also, I read a (potentially shillling) Reddit post promoting the value of incentivized file sharing – the idea being, pay someone a fee to find rare files for you and receive incentives for seeding. This got me thinking – what could the first widely-adopted mainstream dapp look like?



Most dapps can’t compete in the mainstream… yet

To oversimplify, I’d propose the following framework for valuable dapp use cases:

Crypto-only – decentralized exchanges, token distribution, crypto lending

Mainstream use cases – social, media, storage, games, etc (but with a unique crypto-element)

Most “mainstream dapps” I’d focused on have some elements unique to crypto, like token incentivization (e.g. Steemit for social, Storj for storage), or immutability/persistence (e.g. crypto collectibles). These are both compelling characteristics of crypto, which have promising long-term potential like we saw during the early interenet days.



However, for mainstream adoption today, most of the public probably won’t understand the usefulness of things like immutability. For the foreseeable future, most “mainstream” dapps also won’t be able to compete on the basis of things like A) technology (Ethereum is 100x slower than Visa) or user experience (wallet technology today has major usability problems).



Lack of regulation is a very real advantage

Though they might have many avid crypto-enthusiast users, I wouldn’t count on gaming dapps competing with Zynga, or Steemit outcompeting Facebook for the average user either.



So what types of mainstream dapps can compete? Those which both offer unique value due to being dapps AND have little or no mainstream competition due to regulation. The most prominent types of these today include gambling apps and file sharing apps.



The fact that these apps are decentralized means they are inherently more difficult to discover, monitor and regulate. Most of the music industry probably knows little about crypto, let alone how it affects file sharing, meaning it will be a while before they can start pushing against it.



For a dapp like Upfiring, even though there is no competition from big companies, there are obvious unincentivized but highly popular options like Bittorrent.



Could Upfiring surpass Bittorrent? Hard to say obviously, but at the very least it offers potential value by incentivizing sharing of rare files, and seeding overall (which has no incentives in Bittorrent). It’s a much stronger value immediate proposition than other dapp projects that do not really need to be crypto-based, or offer less relevance to average users.



Upfiring can be Napster (or turn into a legit business)

There are a lot of really cool long-term projects in the crypto space, and it’s not meant to disrespect their long-term potential or the hard work that is happening. Separate from dapps, even mainstream crypto today operates on the fringes of the financial system – to get around it by bypassing capital controls, and in places where the financial system is failing.



This sentiment is simply an expression that most of the general public won’t adopt dapps that are crypto-only, technology dependent, or depend on newer benefits of crypto like immutability. However, they might well adopt something they want that local regulations don’t favor. As someone who used to play a bunch of online poker while it was still legal, if someone today built a online poker dapp that didn’t seem like it would steal my money, I would use it today.



There’s no shame in starting on the fringes, since there had to be a Napster or Limewire, before there was a iTunes, Spotify, or even BitTorrent. Upfiring could be the first major dapps in a semilegal decentralized ecosystem, that eventually gives rise to more recognized and mature dapp ecosystem.



Mainstream adoption will probably start on the fringes.

