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2019 was a very eventful year for the entire cryptocurrency community. That year started with a very positive note as finally after a long and bitter bear season the market has found its bottom and started to slowly regain some of its market value. As always the market rally was led by bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. With most cryptocurrencies having a strong correlation to its price movement most of the Altcoins have seen similar gains and at times even surpassing the performance of BTC.

2019 EOS Price performance

While generally speaking the performance of cryptocurrencies in 2019 is better than 2018 it must be noted that we are still far off from recovering from the late 2017 and early 2018 bull run. EOS saw two major price surges in 2018 the first one was at around the middle of January, which can be attributed to the general market condition. The second one around May just before the mainnet release. Since this last price surge, the price of EOS has been seeing lower-lows and lower-highs for the most part of 2018.



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The first half of 2019 saw a reversal of EOS’ price trend. From January 2019 to June 2019 EOS’ price has steadily been recovering. There are two factors at play here. One is the improvement of the general market sentiment with many digital assets increasing in market value. The other one is the sentiment surrounding EOS where it will be celebrating its first anniversary after mainnet launch with around a secret project that was rumored to be a blockchain-powered social media which was later revealed ala “Apple-style” presentation in Washington D.C.

To give us a better perspective on what happened in the EOS’ ecosystem we look at the year-end review of two of the most respected and popular DApps data aggregators in the industry Dappradar and Dapp.com and paid special attention to what they have to say about EOS. This should give as an honest and accurate picture of what really happened during the year including all the successes and challenges that it faced in that period. In addition, they also gave their insight and interpretation of their data which serves as guides for the reader’s own interpretation.



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Dapp.com 2019 Review

According to Dapp.com the blockchains they are monitoring generated around 3.26 Billion blockchain transactions in 2019 with one of EOS’ Dapps contributing to 2.39 Billion transactions or around 73% of the total transactions. Aside from having the most number of transactions of any blockchain, EOS also registered the highest generated volume which is around $5 Billion USD, or nearly 50% of the total volume. Furthermore, EOS DApps has the highest activity among all the platforms with 479 of the 493 DApps active. This means that 97% of all its DApps are active.



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However, during the last quarter of 2019, a new DApp called EIDOS was launched which impacted the CPU resource time of the EOSIO network causing the daily active DApps to drop from 192 to 135.5 which is a 30% sharp drop. Moreover, the average daily active users decrease by as much as 80% from around 79,749 daily users to around 15.363. To give you a better perspective EIDOS users account for only around 2.8% of the total active users on EOS but contributed 85% of the total amount of transactions.



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EIDOS mining resulted in a huge CPU time-resource scarcity problem where many users found themselves unable to use the EOSIO network. DApps developers were hit the most, especially those who have been subsidizing CPU-time resources for their users. Some already jumped ship to other alternatives like the EOS-base “Sidechains” WAX, TELOS and Lynxchain. Fortunately, other developers devised ways to help their users, Newdex, the largest decentralized exchange in EOS, gave their users CPU-FREE trades demonstrating its level of commitment to its customers as well as to the EOS ecosystem.

DappRadar 2019 Review

DappRadar reveals that EOS started 2019 strong, with its price steadily rising and reaching its peak at $8.59 in the middle of the year. This was not surprising as most of the leading blockchains at the time also showed strong performance generally speaking. In addition to having a wonderful uptrend on its price its daily active unique wallets also grew to reach 54,000 daily active unique (DAU) wallets in the same period. However, EOS seemed to have lost some steam moving towards the end of the year with its price retraced to its starting point which is just above $2+ USD.



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DAU also took a hit by the end of 2019 from a sustained DAU of around 40,000 it sharply dropped below 15,000 owing to the launch of the EIDOS mining airdrop which can be seen at best as a mischievous experiment gone wrong or an aggressive DDOS attack on the network. No matter how you look at it EIDOS airdrop mining participants sucked up most of the EOS’ resources that quickly proved to be catastrophic for the wider EOS dapp ecosystem. EOS users with modest Staked tokens cannot interact with the network with some EOS dapps moving to another more stable blockchain.



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Dappradar postulated that since it is extremely cheap to operate large scale bots networks in a “gasless” blockchain those who have bots may by now be spending all their time and resources mining EIDOS which unexpectedly became a filter for bot traffic on the EOS DApp ecosystem. The DApps aggregator site also brought the idea that EIDOS might be a mischievous experiment gone wrong or at worst an aggressive DDOS attack. In every respect 2019, it said, proved to be a very difficult year for the EOS DApp ecosystem.

Newdex Largest DEX on EOS

Furthermore, Dappradar reveals that taken as a whole, excluding ADM, ENBAn, and PRA CandyBox DApps, the most popular EOS DApps were the games EOS Dynasty, EOS Knights, and Prospectors (which migrated to WAX) and the Newdex decentralized exchange. All things considered, it seems that Newdex is proving to be the main driving force for decentralized finance (DeFi) in EOS with its one-stop-shop services combining Decentralized Exchange (DEX), Over-the-counter (OTC) and Newpool, a third-party staking pool the Newdex team invested in.

This revelation strengthens the position of Newdex as the largest DEX on EOS with the largest number of trading pairs in the said blockchain network. It features a full-blown smart contract, matching, and settlement on-chain where users take full custody of the assets. The third-party Staking pool, Newpool offers Newdex users more options for passive income. The continued development and product offering of Newdex is a clear indication that despite the many challenges EOS is currently facing, there are many dedicated developers and project parties out there making contributions to ensure its continued success of the EOS community.

Conclusion

EOS 2019 is far from being perfect. It served as a wake-up call for some of the lingering concerns in the EOS ecosystem. While there is still a lot of space for improvement on the protocol level there has been a lot of development and new offering coming from the EOS developer communities which have taken up the challenge to address the many barriers the current iteration of EOS currently has. A prime example of this is Newdex which continues to innovate in the space to give EOS users more value-added services on its platform.

Now reaching the middle of Q1 2020 there are many exciting forthcoming events in the horizon such as the much-anticipated release of the blockchain-powered social network VOICE as well as the next iteration of EOS dubbed as EOSIO 2.0, which promises not only an even more high-performance blockchain but an easier platform to develop on. No one can predict the future but with so many great things happening in the crypto world this year we can confidently say that it would be a spectacular one at that. A great start for the new decade.

You can find more information about Newdex in its official social links below:

Website: https://newdex.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NewdexOfficial

Medium: https://medium.com/@marketing_27690