The Dapplayer

Allow me to coin a name for the (so far) elusive blockchain player...

Like new continents new techs need new names: that’s what we suddenly figured out, my partner Mehdi Brun and I, whilst checking our Ðapp ruletka.io cool stats and trying to understand who were our users.

A Ðapp, as you may know (or not), is a decentralised app. It means that its code runs nowhere in particular (not on a Facebook’s or Amazon’s servers for instance) but everywhere on a blockchain (Ethereum, 90% of the time). And lately it has been all the rage about Ðapps — a rage on top of the blockchain hype.

That being said, if one wants to understand what’s going on in our ecosystem, it has to be acknowledged that most of the people buzzing about blockchain and Ðapps don’t even understand what they’re talking about ; they simply don’t know that there is no blockchain but many blockchains ; they can’t read a smart contract ; ERC20 token holders majoritarily don’t know how to set and use Metamask — and believe Mist is a heroic fantasy game. Even more disturbing: self-proclaimed crypto-specialists bragging LinkedIn do not understand how to interact with a Ðapp…

So when we launched ruletka.io we pertinently knew we would reach out to a small if not tiny market. But how tiny exactly?

Math ain’t easy here. Since the beginning of the precocious crypto-winter, a lot of users have simply disappeared. If we take the world top ten gambling Ðapps, there’s a current global aggregate of 2000–3000 Ðapps players max. Yes, that’s not a lot. But if you take into account that two thirds of them are engaged in “consensual funny scam exit” games, it leaves us with less than 1000 Daily Active Users (DAU) of gambling Ðapps on the planet. And since a bunch of those players play different Ðapps, the actual total figure could be even lower.

At this point, tired of using periphrasis, I made a suggestion to coin a name for every and each member of this microscopic early-adopters tribe : Dapplayer.

Pretty obvious, right? Well, not so. Seemingly, until now there was no creature known as Dapplayer on Google.

Done: added to personal dictionary.

Now we can name them — the Dapplayers — let’s move on.

How could we possibly estimate accurately the number of these Dapplayers? Easy, you might answer: on the Ethereum blockchain, the ledger is crystal clear. So each time an 0x… makes a move (buy, sell, transfer, confirm, etc.) it’s put on the open ledger — and you can of course “listen” to all this activity and process in-real-time these data. That’s what do curated Ðapps registries such as dappradar or dappvolume or statesofthedapps.

But, wait.

If a Dapplayer equals an 0x… address, what about those using multiple addresses? Myself, I have four of them: one for ETH storage, one for getting my revenues from contracts we’re running, one for playing — and a last (empty) one for testing, when I venture on new Dapps or “revolutionary websites” using Web3 to check if you’re eligible to their blockchain based services. If I play with my addresses #2 and #3 would I be counted as two Dapplayers?

Indeed, I will.

So we went further: we thoroughly checked the Dapplayers addresses of one of the top ranked Ðapp, and guess what we found: most of them were tangled in a cross-web of transactions leading to two major account providing ETH to their drones, having them playing continuously — thus increasing their DAU, thus staying high in the charts, thus deceiving everyone about their real traffic and success…

Ok, we may be naive: I guess that in this scam-prone environment it’s a lesser evil — entrepreneurs creating fake Dapplayers, pocketing their own ETH, duping decent people… But now, at least, we know a few things for sure: gamers on blockchains have a name — Dapplayers — they are a scarce lot, and some of them are fake.

Let’s entertain’em!

David J. Martin | Co-Founder of ruletka.io

"I smell… FUN."