2018 was a fruitful year for the altcoin community. Blockchain crypto projects like Ethereum, TRON, and EOS have been widely adopted as payment methods and tradable assets. Nearly $13 billion in transactions were processed on the three main active blockchains.
EOS made a stunning launch in 2018, raising over $4 billion in token sales, and it managed to overcome Ethereum’s reign in terms of trading volumes on Decentralized Applications (DApps) in just eight months. In September, EOS and Ethereum equaled their trading volumes on DApps, in January however EOS DApps are accounting for 55%, Tron 38%, and Ethereum applications with a mere 6%. The reasons for the shift in preferences for payment is due to the hype EOS, and now TRON, are making, thus – increasing the number of users diversifying their wallet portfolios.
Over 70% of EOS transactions are from gambling DApps, while TRON marks a vast 95% trading volume from gambling DApps. Compared to this, just 2% of the total ETH transactions are coming from betting sites.
Instead of gambling, the Ethereum traffic is mostly made up of trading on decentralized exchanges. Many stablecoin projects have found a safe-haven for their needs in the Ethereum ecosystem, so maybe the ETH power lies elsewhere and not in the DApps space.
All of the gambling DApps usages comes with its risks, however. EOS, for example, became notorious for its weaknesses in the smart contracts. Hackers managed to steal over 40,000 EOS tokens just a week after EOS stated that the security robustness of their system is “at a very high level”.
Will ETH find the way again into gambling DApps leadership? Ethereum plans to create an equally accessible blockchain platform. The blockchain’s maturity over the past couple of years, however, shifted the focus more toward institutional support and acting as a regulated currency, rather than being a haven for gamers and gamblers.