Ethereum is still the biggest and the fastest growing blockchain for smart contracts, driven by lots of activity in blockchain games and more recently decentralized finance. The amount of daily active wallets increased 82 percent in January 2020, compared with the same month one year ago. In comparison: Tron rose by 33 percent, while EOS saw a steep 61 percent decline in daily active users. DappRadar believes these numbers are symbolic for the road ahead.

The biggest hit in January for Ethereum was the blockchain role playing game Brave Frontier Heroes. This mobile game attracted a max of 1240 daily active players, outpacing any other dapp on the market. Knight Story managed to have the highest average users, 669 daily unique wallets.

Ethereum has seen lots of growth in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi). All this together caused the number of active wallets to grow by seven percent in January 2020 alone. That meant over 10 thousand active users every day. At the same time Tron’s activity is mainly based on gambling and other high risk applications.

Ethereum and the road ahead

An improved version of Ethereum should make it possible to process at least 15 thousand transactions per second without moving away from its current decentralized model. This year Ethereum will implement the so-called Beacon Chain, and implement the Phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0. The full version of the next generation Ethereum blockchain is expected to be fully operational in 2022.

In February to long awaited Constantinople update will take place. While the Istanbul hard fork will take place in October 2020. Ethereum is still a mining blockchain (PoW), but will embrace proof-of-stake (PoS) in the near future.

Many blockchain games are build on Ethereum. It’s still the dominant blockchain for gaming. Most of the upcoming blockchain games are build on it. The future for decentralized finance looks good as well, as we’ve been seeing strong growth in recent months. Over 2019 the DeFi market grew 137 percent, and especially DAI has made big steps. The stablecoin grew its footprint by 977 percent in one year.

Also published on Medium.