The decentralised applications (dapp) landscape has been growing steadily over the past year. The recent launch of EOS and continued work to scale Ethereum are reasons for developers to be excited in the year ahead.

This post will cover the current state of dapp development and some of the improvements we can expect to see over the next year. It will be largely focused on Ethereum and EOS based dapps since these two blockchains are the most popular platforms to build on today.

The most popular dapps fall into the following categories:

Games/Collectibles

Exchanges

Gambling

Other

Of note is that we recently ran a dappathon (decentralised apps hackathon) and none of the dapps created fell into the above categories. I may write a future article that covers the dapps developed in the hackathon.

Games/Collectibles

This past year’s crypto games include CryptoKitties, Etheremon and CryptoFighters. If you’re not aware of what a crypto-collectible is, it’s a digital collectible with ownership proven on the blockchain. The same way as you may own 5 Ethereum or 5 BAT tokens, you can own 5 CryptoKitties. These digital kitties or fighters are yours to trade freely on the blockchain. The big difference is that each BAT token is the same as any other, but each crypto kitty has a unique ID and provably unique genes. CryptoKitties was huge at the end of 2017 with some cats being sold for as much as $140,000.

This is what the first crypto-kitty, Genesis, looks like:

Genesis, CryptoKitty 1

And this is what Genesis looks like on the blockchain:

Genesis on the blockchain

Genesis’ genes are: “626837621154801616088980922659877168609154386318304496692374110716999053” and we’re ultimately reliant on the creators of CryptoKitties to tell us what each cat looks like based on some internal algorithm.

One cool feature about CryptoKitties is breeding: if you own two cats, you can breed them together to create a new one. The new cat’s genes are a hybrid of its parents genes — it inherits features from both. You had the ability to breed new cats for close to nothing and then sell them for a profit. This was a big part of the hype when it came out.

In the first few months CryptoKitties generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue and has since raised $12 million in funding from the likes of Andreesen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. Today, the game has around 450 daily active users and $150,000 of weekly volume.

CrytoKitties taught a lot of people the basics of blockchain and using tools such as MetaMask.

Other games take the concept in a slightly different direction. In CryptoFighters, users battle teams of warriors. The battle takes place on the blockchain and the winner receives a new digital fighter as a reward. Every time you battle, you also increase the stats of your fighters. Once you win you move up the leaderboard.

CryptoFighters arena

People collect and play CryptoKitties and CryptoFighters for different reasons. Some of the early players were just there to make money. Others like collecting items, the same way as one may collect Pokemon cards, baseball cards (there’s even an official crypto version of that), stamps, or rare artwork. Others are there for the fun of the game.

Other popular games of the past year are of the Ponzi/Pyramid scheme type. In these games the main reason to buy an item is the hope someone else buys it off you. Examples include CryptoCelebrities and Crypto All Stars (which was shut down after a day after doing $100k in sales). In these games, the last person holding the bag loses a lot of money.

Other popular games of this genre are FOMO3D and POWH3D by Team Just. A bit about the popular FOMO3D game that had a 10,500 ether winner a few months back (~$2.5 million):

Fomo3D is an ironic jab at the cryptocurrency ICO space, putting every player in the terrifying and tempting position to Exit Scam everything and run away with massive life-changing amounts of real Ethereum. You should take it. Made by Team JUST as a 100% trustless library of smart contracts. The game runs entirely on human greed, to the profit of everyone playing. (DappRadar)

FOMO3D has some luck elements to it and is considered a gambling dapp on some of the major dapp websites. We will cover other gambling dapps in a later section.

What’s next for crypto games?

The current generation of crypto games has showed us what is possible. Tens of thousands of people have played a crypto-game to date, but how does that number get pushed to millions?

One of the biggest problems dapps face right now is that they’re difficult to use. To start playing CryptoFighters for example, you’d have to buy some ether, install the MetaMask Chrome extension or download Trust Wallet, send the ether to your MetaMask or Trust Wallet, find a fighter you’d like to purchase, put through a blockchain transaction using a scary looking popup that asks for a gas price and limit (new users have no idea what these are), wait a few minutes or hours for the transaction to go through. Then each in-game action such as battling or selling a fighter requires you to use that same MetaMask pop up window and confirm your action.

When the Ethereum network was congested there were people paying $5 of ether to do a simple battle.

Slow transactions, expensive transactions, and tooling all still need improving to take blockchain gaming, and dapps in general, to the next level.

This is a problem for current dapps, but it’s also a potential place to innovate and improve things. People are working on scaling the Ethereum blockchain with ideas such as sharding and Proof of Stake, as well as working on layer 2 solutions such as Plasma and state channels.

One company working on scaling through Plasma sidechains is Loom. They are one of the first implementors of a working Plasma Cash solution and will soon be launching their first game, Zombie Battlegrounds: