Naval Ravikant recently shared this thought:

“The dirty secrets of blockchains: they don’t scale (yet), aren’t really decentralized, distribute wealth poorly, lack killer apps, and run on a controlled Internet.”

https://twitter.com/naval/status/983016288195829770

In this post, I want to dive into his fourth observation that blockchains “lack killer apps” and understand just how far away we are to real applications (not tokens, not store of value, etc.) being built on top of blockchains.

Thanks to Dappradar, I was able to analyze the top decentralized applications (DApps) built on top of Ethereum, the largest decentralized application platform. My research is focused on live public DApp’s which are deployed and usable today. This does not include any future or potential applications not deployed yet.

If you look at a broad overview of the 312 DApps created, the main broad categories are:

I. Decentralized Exchanges

II. Games (Largely collectible type games, excluding casino/games of chance)

III. Casino Applications

IV. Other (we’ll revisit this category later)

On closer examination, it becomes clear only a few individual DApps make up the majority of transactions within their respective category: