Starting from May 17, 2018, DappTotal observe an unusual growth of a blockchain-based game, i.e., Ether Shrimp Farm. As shown in Figure 1, the number of active users reaches 9,318 on May 18, 2018, which is record-high among all crypto games! We are interested in learning how a simple web3-based crypto idle game beats the popular CryptoKitties. To answer that question, we use our proprietary DAppTotal analytics platform to study the particular crypto game. We find out that the blasting growth is largely contributed by click-farming, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first case being used to boost the number of active users of DApps and grasp more market shares.

Figure 1: Ether Shrimp Farm DAU

Ether Shrimp Farm is a crypto idle game based on Ethereum smart contracts which are published on May 15, 2018. It’s a really simple game with only four buttons to play with in the beginning. You can start from either getting free shrimp or buying shrimp eggs. By hatching the eggs, you can produce shrimp while shrimp produce eggs automatically with a programmed rate. As long as you have enough eggs, you can sell eggs for profit.

Figure 2: Ether Shrimp Farm GUI

So, who are those record-high 9,318 addresses? Our analysis starts from the transactions targeting the Ether Shrimp Farm contract (to = 0x58aff91f5b48245bd83deeb2c7d31875f68b3f0d). As we collect all transactions issued in May 17–18 with that particular to address, we get 9,608 different from addresses.

After collecting these addresses, our next step is examine possible common properties among them. One obvious way is to trace their funding source. Surprisingly, we find out that one single address transferred Ether to 5,388 of the 9,608 user addresses. Moreover, this particular funding address 0x00afa95466efb13d67d608b455dd47cfd5e300c3 made one-time transfer of exactly 0.003 ETH to 5,354 of the 5,388 addresses, which looks really suspicious. Another group of 971 addresses funded by the address 0x825d5d0df3b2d59f69cc673f041ca91a296b8183 contributes ~10% of the active users. Our analysis results indicate that the two funding addresses control 66% of the record-high DAU! In Figure 3, we classify the 9,608 individual shrimp farmers by the source of funding (only the top10 funding addresses are displayed).

Figure 3: May 17–18, 2018 DAU Breakdown by Funding Source

As shown in Figure 3, more than 73% of active users are actually “bots”. To prove our theory, we further analyze the time distribution of the transactions issued by bots based on our hypothesis that bots should batch-process the transactions as they are controlled by program.

Figure 4: Time Distribution of Transactions Issued by “Bots”

Figure 4 illustrates the time distribution of transactions issued from the 5,388 addresses targeting to the Ether Shrimp Farm smart contract. The x-axis is the block number from low to high, which is equivalent to the timeline. As for the y-axis, we label each address with an integer number from 0 to 5,387. Each dot (x,y) in Figure 4 indicates a transaction issued by address number y happened at block x. It is obvious that those 5,388 addresses make transactions simultaneously as illustrated by the vertical lines with multiple dots in the figure.

However, we are still unable to tell if those bots are used for click farming to boost the number of DAUs or simply for making money. However, the cost to perform App Store Optimization (ASO) on DApps is really low when compared with the promotion of Android/iOS apps. Specifically, it costs only ~0.0004 ETH (~$0.25 in current price) to simulate one user. Currently, since the size of active DApps users is still relatively small, the ASO practice seems be very efficient, which obviously is not fair to other Dapp developers and the community as a whole.

As of writing this post, the long term champion, CryptoKitties, in DAppTotal crypto game ranking is now ranked #4. The new champion, Ether Shrimp Farm, drops to rank #3 with 746 DAU. We consider the current DAU reflects the organic user growth after a few days of “boosting”. In order to differentiate other normal DApps from ASO-leveraged DApps, DAppTotal has explicitly labeled Ether Shrimp Farm with “ASO”, as shown in the following screenshot:

About US

DappTotal is an industry-leading blockchain data analytics platform with the goal of serving broad blockchain ecosystem and providing a timely, comprehensive, and trustworthy ranking of popular Dapps in various categories. We are reachable at Telegraph (t.me/DappTotal), Twitter, and Email (support@dapptotal.com).