Ethereum dapp projects have more than tripled in a year from around 400 to now more than 1,200 according to data from State of the Dapps.
Endless games, financial applications, tokenized digital assets, artistic projects and some more creative projects, are now running on ethereum’s blockchain. With 562 of them currently live and usable while the rest are in beta or still in prototype.
We tried to get into peepeth, or just peep for short, but apparently we need to be invited. As we din’t want to bother the devs with fast-tracking us, we’ll look at it from the distance for now.
It’s basically twitter, but with eth and IPFS. That means it’s decentralized in its underlying technology, but the front-interface is just a web3 site.
That means you also have to pay, a penny or so, to tweet and reply. In return, you gain full control of your data. So if you wanted to move to peepcash, you can just put up another web3 interface to communicate with the underlying blockchain and IPFS tech.
Browsing it appears to be pretty fast to us with no hick-ups. Making it quite usable, but just how usable we’ll have to wait and see once we get the invite.
We’re going to highlight somewhat randomly some dapps and we haven’t really reviewed them as just wanted to give a taste of what’s out there.
First is userfeeds, which sounds quite interesting, but we couldn’t figure out what to click to get to the actual dapp. So we’ll settle for a description of it instead.
“What if the owner of the crypto-cat could make it perform other actions such as posting or sharing information and reacting to other crypto-characters,” Maciej Olpinski, co-founder of Userfeeds.io, says before adding:
“Imagine that the digital cat could tell jokes, break the news, engage with other cats or promote products and services. Imagine it could act as a uniquely identifiable channel for distribution of information.”
Don’t worry, we’re not going to replace trustnodes with a cat just yet, but it’s an interesting idea of connecting these tokenized assets with other dapps or other functions.
“The whole class of fascinating applications becomes possible once we consider crypto-characters as unique, rare and tradable information-broadcasting channels. Just like social media accounts or fan pages… but with fictional characters,” Olpinski says.
Because just kitties were not enough, so we marry them to crypto-bots, add some crypto-emojis, give them talking power, send them loose, and all the sudden “crypto-characters will colonize the existing Web 2.0 properties.”
There’s apparently a web3 site where you can just buy a pixel and its all recorded on the blockchain. Then you can sell it.
Why, we don’t know, but there was a version of it for the internet in the early days if you remember, so why not.
Because low hanging fruits are back and with it comes plenty of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
We were tempted to download this, but we don’t use windows. Thank god, otherwise this article would have never been done.
They claim no rake, or fee, which is big if true. Making the game potentially more of a mathematical art. Although really you can never discount chance here, but we won’t get into that debate.
This is decentraland. Well, the, sort of, sky view of a bit of it. Because apparently you can kind of zoom in and go all three dimensional and even battle ethermons on there.
Jealous. Can’t wait to tell our kids when we were their age our games were so rubbish while they get all these talking dapps, fantasy upon fantasy, games.
“The finite, traversable, 3D virtual space within Decentraland is called LAND, a non-fungible digital asset maintained in an Ethereum smart contract,” the project says before adding:
“Land is divided into parcels that are identified by cartesian coordinates (x,y). These parcels are permanently owned by members of the community and are purchased using MANA, Decentraland’s cryptocurrency token.
This gives users full control over the environments and applications that they create, which can range from anything like static 3D scenes to more interactive applications or games.”
Our last one is a decentralized exchange, Idex, which has somewhat surprisingly handled some 8,000 eth in trading volumes during the past 24 hours.
That suggests some decent demand for it, and perhaps growing demand, with ethereum’s dapp ecosystem now taking shape. Allowing us, for the first time really, to actually see what use these smart contracts, dapps, and so on, have.
We’ve left out the big, more well known, ones, just as we have left out far, far too many other dapps. With this brief experience of browsing around for this article reminding us very much of the experience of browsing around the internet in the early days.
You know, when it was all new, and cool, and aspiring, and was about to change the world, as it very much did, yet perhaps not quite how we thought back then.
So this might be internet 2.0, a second attempt to try and implement that decentralized spirit where man is free, and in that communal freedom has some fun too, capricious fun or otherwise.
