Why the Ontology Platform Should be the Choice for dApp Developers Jesse LIU Follow Aug 16, 2019 · Unlisted

Foreword

I am not a fan of today’s dApp ecosystems, though I understand building a good dApp ecosystem takes time.

I think there are some common issues with today’s dApp ecosystems:

Low-quality products (bad user experience, product logic, and customer service) Unsustainable model (no stable source of income and sustainable operation model) Inexperienced team (no experience in team management and traditional apps)

Moreover, most dApp developers today have only one thing in mind:

They only want to make a quick buck from their dApps and do not have a solid product iteration and financial plan.

Most dApp games can’t even find their target users:

Think about it. Most dApps games wish to convert game players into users who will make transactions in their dApps and in turn play their games more. In reality, perhaps only one out of 100 users is willing to both play the game and make transactions. Surprisingly, most dApps are only focusing on this 1% of users.

What’s more surprising, dApp platforms even encourage dApps to do so.

The main aim of this article is to debunk the false claim of some dApp platforms that “they are the top 4 public blockchains because of the number of dApps and users on their platforms”. When you are not even clear about which token model works for your dApp ecosystem, whatever else you do will all be in vain. But some public chains even encourage dApps to falsify their data to support their thoroughly shaky claim.

In this article, I want to show dApp developers what a good dApp ecosystem should look like and encourage them to start thinking about how to build better dApps so that there will be a win-win for dApp platforms, developers, and users.

A Glance at Today’s dApp Ecosystems

Since the emergence of the Internet and the prevalence of smartphones, application development has become a hot topic. As the blockchain technology catches on, developing dApps (decentralized applications) based on this technology has also become the choice for many developers.

Why do developers develop applications? At the end of the day, they want their products to generate traffic and profit so they will have enough money to keep their projects running. The keywords here are traffic and profit.

Currently, the main categories of dApps on public chains include:

Gaming dApps: Gaming dApps can generate both traffic and profit. But the security and trust system is yet to be built. Overall good for the platform; Games: Games can generate neither traffic nor profit and are solely supported by the subsidies from the platform. Fake data is rampant and games are no good for the platform; DeFi: DeFi dApps can generate profit and support their development. Their mid-to-long-term operation capability is yet to be proven. Overall good for the platform; Utilities: Utility dApps can generate traffic but may have difficulty supporting themselves. Overall good for the platform in the middle and long term.

To draw more developers, many public chain projects have rolled out their own dApp incentive plans. These plans are mostly the same in that they are aimed to attract more developers to develop dApps on their chains, which can bring more users and traffic, and in turn more transactions on the chains. On the other hand, why would developers want to develop dApps on these public chain platforms? Yes, they need the financial, operational, and marketing support from public chain projects. But another big reason is that they need the user base on these chains, whether they are technical users or token holders. In this way, dApp developers don’t need to worry about no one will use their dApps and they can generate traffic at low cost.

Something is wrong here. Yes, you are right. The dApp platforms and dApp developers want exactly the same thing from each other.

Now how could this possibly work out? Since dApp platforms can’t give dApp developers what they want and vice versa, it is impossible for them to work together, let alone generating traffic and profit.

You might say this is not contradictory since they can generate some new users for each other and can share their resources. Let’s see how it works in reality.

On public chain platforms with the single token model, we can think of two scenarios.

§ Scenario 1:

Since you need token to make transactions in dApps, when users use the dApps frequently, then according to the demand curve, the demand for the tokens will go up, thus the token price will rise.