Earlier today my attention was drawn to a tweet by blockchain researcher Kevin Rooke in which he notes how few active users the most popular dApps on both the Ethereum and EOS network have.

The data used in Rooke’s tweet, of course, comes from dAppRadar who recently added an EOS dApp tracker. Asides from Rooke’s observation that across both blockchains only 8 dApps had more than 300 active users in the last 24 hours before his check, when looking at the top 15 most popular ETH dApps the majority of activity seems to revolve around exchanges, with five exchanges in the top 15 most popular Ethereum dApps. Next, there’s a pyramid scheme as well as three gambling dApps. Ethereum’s dApps Top 15 is completed by 5 games and a collectibles dApp. The least popular dApp in its top 15 at the time of writing had 117 users in the last 24 hours, generating 529 transactions.

Most popular ETH dApps

dApps on the Steem Blockchain

When comparing these rankings to the Steem blockchain, the blockchain which aims to reward the creation of content, it quickly becomes obvious how big a player Steem already is in the world of dApps. Merely two years old, and with the Smart Media Tokens announcement less than a year ago, the platform currently doesn’t yet have a fully fledged optimized infrastructure to host dApps but it is already possible to operate interfaces to the Steem blockchain. Several of those interfaces are so-called “everything buckets”, which show all content submitted to the Steem blockchain, irrespective of what dApp they were posted from. Others are content specific verticals like the recently covered Musing.io, the popular DLive video streaming platform, and decentralized photo sharing app SteepShot, which we covered last year. There is no doubt that the Steem blockchain will see many more dApps being rolled out on the platform as we near the release of the SMT platform.

How Popular Are SteemApps?

To get an insight in how active the Steem blockchain and the dApps operating on it are, we resorted to the data offered by the Sincerity API.

Most Popular SteemApps - Sept. 4th, 2018 Unsurprisingly, the three most popular dApps on the Steem blockchain are so-called everything buckets. Steemit Inc. operated Steemit.com leads the pack with 25,738 actively posting/commenting accounts in last 7 days, followed by alternative interface Busy.org, and the (mobile) eSteem app. Five of the next six spots are content vertical dApps on the Steem blockchain, dApps built and active already before the SMT platform is even rolled out. The sixth dApp is the ever growing in popularity @partiko mobile app. Leaving aside the bots, next comes the recently launched activity tracker [Actifit](https://actifit.io) to close our automated-free top 10. The top 15 is completed by four more content vertical specific apps and one more “everything bucket” app, the recently launched Steempeak. Looking at the numbers, as reported by the Sincerity API it is of note here that SteemPeak which launched merely 3 months ago already counts 364 active accounts in last 7 days and combined 3894 posts and comments were posted from the app in the same period. Or 556 transactions per day, which is more than the 0xUniverse, the least popular dApp in the ETH top 15 with 529 transactions in last 24 hours¹.

Steemhunt - product enthusiasts on the Steem blockchain Analyzing the submissions through the three most popular non-everything bucket SteemApps - respectively DTube, Steepshot, and DLive - all three had more than 1,250 active users each in 7 days and accounted for more than 16,000 posts and comments submitted through their apps combined. Video hosting platform DTube registered 4,904 posts (videos) submitted in that period through its platform. In number of weekly transactions, excluding upvotes made through the platforms, this is pretty much on par with all games on the Ethereum network but for CryptoKitties which still leads the ~~pack~~ litter by miles. When looking further down the top 15, the ninth popular app, @Steemhunt, saw 13,373 posts and comments submitted through its app over the same 7 days, from 757 users. Almost 2,000 submissions per day.

Steem, the Dark Horse of the World of dApps

Often lauded by its members and advocates for its fast and feeless transactions, the Steem blockchain consistently ranks in Blocktivity’s top 3, after having led the pack for months non-stop last year and beginning 2018. With still much capacity available on the network, contrarily to the always suffering Ethereum network, there is no doubt that the launch of SMTs - as well as the upcoming HardFork20 release - Velocity, with improved account creation process, will result in many more SteemApps/dApps being created on the network and always higher activity because contrarily to many dApps SteemApps can be highly optimized user experiences and are accessible to anyone, without needing to know much about cryptocurrengy - or GAS for that matter.

Blocktivity rankings September 4, 2018 That is even without mentioning the rewards Steemians can earn from creating content on the Steem blockchain. According to SteemOcean, @steemhunt generated $TU4,154 rewards in the period from August 22 to August 27, 2018. Since its inception the platform already generated $TU93,432 in rewards for its contributors, users who hunted products and commented on the products hunted. While everyone may be focused on both the Ethereum and EOS blockchains, Steem is a major player already in the dApps world, that even before its dApps optimized infrastructure is released early next year.

Posts and comments do not include upvotes made through any SteemApp. ↩

This post was initially published on theSteemobserver and cross-posted to the Steem blockchain with SteemPress.