The cryptocurrency community rejoiced on the mainnet launch of the oldest ICO, Augur. The prediction platform went live with few hiccups, none serious, all of which were addressed quickly by the development team. A week in after the excitement, user count and volume have dwindled on the back of an untuned user experience. But data shows this clearly is not be an isolated case for Augur, but in fact, a visible issue with Decentralized Applications (Dapps). The top 10 used Dapps have now seen a whopping median drop of 95% from peak users.

2018 is witnessing a ramp-up of projects going onto the Ethereum mainnet. Dappradar, which tracks Dapp activity has a listed 650 applications. But outside of a few dozen Dapps, mainly exchanges, there is no transactional volume.

Active daily users on Dapps have been plummeting week on week. Diar number crunching shows that there are currently less than 1600 users active on the Top 10 Dapps based on user count. And transactional volume is dwindling alongside dropping users. To make matters a little more bleak, the most used decentralized exchanges, IDEX, ForkDelta and Bancor have seen their user base dwindle to less than 5% from peak in a short few months.

|| ENTER AUGUR

Augur, one of the most anticipated projects went live a week ago, but was met with as much criticism as enthusiasm on the back of a complex user experience. The results are apparent - users dropped off quickly despite a massive $400k in volume on day one on Fifa World Cup markets.

Credit though should be given to the ease of being able to deploy Augur and access the application via Github in neat executable packages for all operating systems. And starting a market is also a fairly straight forward process. But taking a position on markets required more trading acumen than expected on a simple Yes/No question.

|| OPPORTUNITY, NOT OBITUARY

The opportunity, then, is in developing a user experience akin to current market platforms. That could be burdened on the shoulders of Augur, or any development team - or it can be an opportunity for others to add new ancillary services as part of the ecosystem.