Top 10 Most Useful dApps on Ethereum

9/10/2018

Many in the crypto space have been attacking Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation for not fulfilling promises made in the past, network congestion and a network full of useless dApps. Despite this negative sentiment towards Ethereum and the market in general, I believe that Ethereum is here to stay and that there are actually plenty of real, useful dApps on the network.

Below, I’ve curated a list of the Top 10 Useful dApps that are currently on the Ethereum network.

*Don't focus too much on the order, but instead on the dApps themselves.

#1 IDEX & ForkDelta

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are undoubtedly one the best things to be developed on the Ethereum Network. They provide users with true security and they minimize the need for trusting a third party with funds. Despite the fact that decentralized exchanges on the Ethereum network allow for trading amongst Ether and ERC20 Tokens, they do not support cross-chain trading or other Ethereum Token standards which hinders DEX adoption. Despite this, IDEX and ForkDelta are the two most popular decentralized applications on Ethereum and they boast the following stats as of today:

IDEX

Status: Live
Weekly Active Users: 9,879
Weekly Volume: 44,425 ETH
Weekly Transaction Count: 118,725

ForkDelta

Status: Live
Weekly Active Users: 4,431
Weekly Volume: 118,725 ETH
Weekly Transaction Count: 27,621

Links:
IDEX
ForkDelta

#2 Ethereum Name Service

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) takes aim at solving many issues in the current wallet address system in Ethereum. It allows for users to display their wallet address as a human-readable name. Many critics in and outside of the cryptocurrency space take aim at long and unreadable wallet addresses as a reason cryptocurrencies will never be adopted, but with the Ethereum Name Service, you could be sending Ether to vitalik.eth instead of 0x8e73aef2448068d4e31f86aa08279465339ff601. It doesn't end with just sending and receiving at these shortened and readable addresses, you can also interact with smart contracts and dApps using ENS domains. ENS supports the following wallets and dApps:

Mobile Wallets:

• Cipher
• imToken
• Leth
• Status

Desktop Wallets:

• Metamask
• Mist
• MyEtherWallet
• My Crypto

Apps:

• Aragon
• Bitfinex
• Etherscan
• Swarm

Links:
Ethereum Name Service

#3 Bounties Network

Bounties Network allows for users to post tasks that they need to be fulfilled, once fulfilled the person who completed the task gets rewarded in Ether or an Ethereum Token. The tasks range from Beginner to Advanced and most tasks can be completed without software development experience. Bounties Network is clearly a great way to earn some extra income, some beginner tasks are rewarding as much as 4 ETH ($700+) upon completion. They boast the following stats:

Status: Live
Weekly Active Users: 120
Weekly Volume: 138.628 ETH
Weekly Transaction Count: 868

Links:
Website - Bounties Network Website
dApp - Bounties Network Dapp

#4 Decentralized News Network

Decentralized News Network (DDN) aims at providing its users with decentralized, accurate news that is censorship resistant. As stated in their whitepaper, “Decentralized News Network is a news platform that combines news creation with decentralized networks as a means to delivering factual content, curated by a community of readers, writers, and reviewers. DNN will harness the power of the Ethereum blockchain to create an infrastructure that is virtually impossible to infiltrate or takedown. Since DNN is not centralized, it does not suffer from having a single point of failure. The platform’s core purpose is to present news as accurately as possible, free of any corrupt incentives or hidden agendas, which plague most news corporations.” There is also an incentive mechanism to ensure that people will create and review on the platform. Decentralized News Network aims at restoring everyone's right to free and accurate news. They boast the following stats:

Status: Beta
Weekly Active Users: 8,278
Weekly Volume: 0.01 ETH
Weekly Transaction Count: 8,296

Links:
Website - Decentralized News Network Website
dApp - Decentralized News Network dApp

#5 LocalEthereum

LocalEthereum is a marketplace in which you can buy and sell Ether without the hassle of signing up online, giving up personal sensitive information to exchanges and having to trust the exchanges to securely store your Ether. Buyers and sellers are given two options: Buy and sell locally to peers around them, or buy and sell worldwide through payments such as Paypal, Western Union, Gift Cards, Wire Transfers, and Venmo. All interactions pass through a smart contract that ensures trustlessness and decentralization. Messages between buyers and sellers are also encrypted using a mechanism inspired by Signal Protocol. Bypassing centralized exchanges follows the fundamentals of decentralization that brought many into the cryptocurrency space in the first place. LocalEthereum boasts the following stats:

Status: Live
Weekly Active Users: 909
Weekly Volume: 1997.592 ETH
Weekly Transaction Count: 3,069

Links:
LocalEthereum

#6 Augur

Augur is a decentralized prediction market protocol that allows anyone to create a market regarding any event or topic and then buy and sell shares of this market depending on what they think the outcome will be. The immediate benefit to this is that anyone can create a market that they are knowledgeable about and potentially earn some money. A benefit that is overlooked is company forecasting, as stated on Augur’s website “Companies can use Augur to guide decision making by forecasting vital information such as total product sales and project completion times”. In other words, companies and users can analyze an Augur market’s data in order to guide the important decisions within their company. An example of this would be Apple setting up a market on whether or not they would sell 1,000,000 new iPhones within the first week of its release. Depending on how the market preforms, Apple would then be able to adjust their sales goals. Augur boasts the following stats:

Status: Live
Weekly Active Users: 142
Weekly Volume: 1,351 ETH
Weekly Transaction Count: 823

Links:
Website - Augur Website
dApp -Augur dApp

#7 SONM

SONM is advertised as the most powerful supercomputer, capable of solving problems in data analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data. Essentially, SONM is a cloud computing platform that is decentralized and distributed amongst all of its users. The benefit of this is that the cost is much cheaper than purchasing computation resources from a centralized data center. According to SONM website, the distribution of the supercomputer makes it possible to build extremely scalable and distributed systems, that can achieve performance and efficiency, not available with traditional cloud-based architecture. Users can purchase and sell computer power by using the SONM ERC20 token. SONM boasts the following stats:

Status: Live
Weekly Active Users: 208
Weekly Transaction Count: 322

Links:
SONM

#8 Viewly

Viewly is advertised as a tokenized video platform. Viewly is similar to Youtube except for the fact that users can vote on their favorite videos, these votes then translate into the VIEW token which acts as a form of payment to the video creator for publishing good content. The system is very similar to that of steemit except for the fact that its a video platform instead of a blogging platform. Viewly boasts the following stats:

Status: Live
Weekly Active Users: 17
Weekly Transaction Count: 44

Links:
Viewly

#9 OpenSea

OpenSea is a decentralized marketplace for digital goods on Ethereum. These include collectibles, gaming items, and other items that were created and held on the Ethereum blockchain. On OpenSea, users can purchase or sell any of these items through an Ethereum smart contract, meaning that no central authority ever holds custody of these items. Using OpenSea provides digital goods with liquidity and could give some people an excuse to keep collecting and selling crypto kitties. OpenSea boasts the following stats:

Status: Live
Weekly Active Users: 161
Weekly Volume: 51.574 ETH
Weekly Transaction Count: 433

Links:
OpenSea

#10 Aragon

Aragon is a decentralized autonomous organization(DAO) creation platform. A DAO allows for a borderless and permissionless way of governance that is secured by the Ethereum blockchain. Users can create their own DAO governance model to manage their funds, vote on certain decisions with their peers and much more. The Aragon platform allows for DAOs to be created and managed in a much simpler fashion than doing it independently. Unfortunately, not all functionality has been implemented into the Aragon dApp yet. Despite this, Aragon boasts the following stats:

Status: Beta
Weekly Active Users: 150
Weekly Transaction Count: 318

Links:
Aragon Website
Aragon dApp

Honorable Mention: EthPolls

EthPolls is a decentralized poll voting system held on the Ethereum Blockchain. Online poll voting and statistics suffer the vulnerabilities of voting bots, uneducated users who cast votes and a centralized third party hosting the vote. A real-world example of these issues is on many exchanges. Exchanges often hold votes in which they allow users to vote on which coins they want as a listed asset on the exchange. The coin with the most votes wins. More often then not, coin developers/project leaders pay for voting bots or dishonestly encourage the community to vote on their project. Holding votes on a blockchain allows for votes to be protected from voting bots via Ethereum's protocol (specifically gas transaction fees), this also eliminates the incentive for uneducated users to vote since each vote will cost a small amount of Ether and each voter can only vote once. EthPolls removes the third party and ensures additional security and honesty regarding votes.

Links:
EthPolls Website
EthPolls dApp

Disclaimer: I created EthPolls.

Leave a comment below letting me know if you agree or disagree on the dApps I've chosen and let me know If you have any recommendations for content I should write about next!