Dapp Industry Report: January 2021

Feb, 2021 Dapp Industry
Report:
January 2021
Ethereum’s NFT sector grew more than 10X to
$33 million in January 2021.
The start of 2021 has been exciting for the crypto industry.
BTC has broken through $40K, ETH has topped $1400,
and the market’s total capitalization has reached $1
trillion.
The DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum rem ained the most
significant market in the blockchain industry. Total value
locked topped $30 billion .
Ethereum’s scalability issues continued which resulted in
increased gas prices. Ethereum -focused Layer 2 sol utions,
as well as rival Layer 1 blockchains, continued showing
progress in January 2021.
Expectedly, plenty of excitement came from the NFT
sector where leading dapps were replaced by newbies.
NBA Top Shots and Hashmasks shook the NFT space
with all -time high sales in the initial week of 2021.

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Table of contents
● Key takeaways
● Ethe reum’s scalability issues continue
● Ethereum still leads the tribe
● DeFi hits all -time high TVL
● More excitement for NFTs
● NBA Top Shot leads NFT category
● The new NFT project by Pranksy
● Hashmasks is the leading NFTs platform on
Ethereum
● January in -summary
Key takeaways
● The Ethereum blockchain generated 86% of
total transaction volumes in January or more
than $112 billion.
● In terms of daily active wallets, the blockchain
accounts for 30% or 72,000 unique active
wallets daily.

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● The DeFi eco system generated 99% of
Ethereum activity.
● Ethereum’s NFT sector grew by more than 10
times from $3 million in December to $33
million in January. The biggest contributors
were CrytpoPunks and Hashmasks.
● The Flow blockchain’s most active dapp NBA
Top Shots reached all -time highs and took the
leadership position in the NFT space with more
than $40 million in sales volumes.
● BSC had the best month so far. The blockchain
surpassed $15 billion in transaction volumes.
The biggest contributors were Venus and
Panca keSwap.
● Wax had the best month in terms of daily active
wallets surpassing 21,000. The fastest -growing
dapp Alien Worlds contributed the most.
Ethereum scalability issues
continue
Ethereum gas prices tend to grow In waves. At the
beginning of 2020, there was the Tether USDT
stablecoin wave which was followed by the DeFi
ecosystem or yield farming wave in the middle of

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summer. In 2021, the increased gas prices are mainly
triggered by DeFi and NFT activity .
Although the arrival of Ethereum 2.0 looks promising,
developers are moving to different blockchains or
layer 2 solutions. BSC distributed several new DeFi
dapps now showing growth. Matic showed its
po tential to grab games activity. While Flow
demonstrated the potential of the NFT sector with the
best growing NFT dapp – NBA Top Shot .
Source: DappRadar
Ethereum still leads the tribe
Historically, the main contenders to Ethereum’s
dominance were EOS and Tron and although these
protocols generated substantial activity in 2021, other
projects such as Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Wax
have quickly risen to prominence.

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In terms of unique active wallets, Ethereum, BSC, and
Wax grew daily unique active wallets month -on -month
by 29%, 10%, and 9% respectively in January.
The biggest category for the Ethereum blockchain
was still the DeFi ecosystem . Uniswap and 1inch
Exchange were the two biggest contributors with
unique active wallets of 44,000 and 3,400
respectively.
BSC also showed improved results. PancakeSwap on
average generated 11,000 unique active wallets while
Venus was around 1,000.
Source: DappRadar

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WAX was leading in terms of games activity with a
dapp called Alien Worlds . Growth from 1,700 to
almost 8,000 unique active wallets meant it was the
fastest -growing dapp on WAX in January 2021.
Source: DappRadar
Other Ethereum contenders such as Polkadot,
Cosmos, NEAR Protocol, Solana, Avalanche, and
others are trying to challenge too.
Reef Finance debuted as the first Polkadot project.
Additionally, Polkadot’s price rallied by 85% in January
2021 and surpassed XRP in market capitalization.

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Source: CoinGecko
The beginning o f 2021 looks very promising for the
Flow blockchain which is designed as the foundation
for a new generation of games, apps, and the digital
assets that pow er them. NBA Top Shot shook the NFT
industry and became a leading NFT dapp in just a
matter of weeks.
Source: DappRadar

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As Ethereum str uggles with scalability limitations,
Layer 2 solutions have come to the fore. Recently
Aavegotchi and SkyWeaver announced that they will
be launching on Matic Network which appears to have
caused an increase in the number of unique active
wallets.
Source: DappRadar
DeFi hits all -time high TVL
January was a very exciting month in terms of value
created in the blockchain space. Total value locked
(TVL) has just passed the $30 billion line. As reported
before, the main reason behind such a surge was
January token price increases. Uniswap’s $UNI and
Compound’s $COMP surged to $20.03 and $366
respectively .

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Source: DappRadar
In the event of a surge in the price of ETH and other
altcoins, aTVL shows the true growth of assets added
to the smar t contracts. According to aTVL , the value
surged from $12 billion to $14 billion within January.
This metric, alongside TVL, helps to better understand
DeFi ecosystem growth .

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Source: DappRadar
As impressive growth within the DeFi ecosystem
continues into 2021 the NFT sectors showed
increased activity too. Not only well -known da pps
spiked in terms of transaction volumes. Newbies
showed their potential to overtake the old guard.
More excitement for NFTs
During the second half of 2 020 rivals were trying to
emulate Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem while 2021
appears to be starting with the mirroring of NFTs.
Recently, Tron announced its NFT standard TRC -721 .
Overall, the collectibles sector has been heating up
with sales numbers growing quickly. The top two
projects making the biggest impact in terms of

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transaction volumes have been Ethereum’s Crypto
Punks and Flow’s NBA Top Shot.
Crypto Punks has been deliv ering high -value sales.
Most recently, an Alien CryptoPunk 2890 was sold for
605 ETH or over $760K . NBA Top Shot also made a
couple of sales amounting to $100,00 0 per moment.
Source: DappRadar
NBA Top Shot leads NFT category
It didn’t take long for NBA Top Shot to gain traction in
the blockchain industry. Recently, the platform surged
to the number one position in the NFT sector with
some record -breaking sale s. Comparatively,
CryptoPunks, the very first NFT collection built on
blockchain took three years to reach sales of more
than $100,000.

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NBA Top Shot has seen the best sales in January
2021 with over $40 million sales volume generated
subsequently driving the dapp to number one.
Source: CryptoSlam.io
New NFT project by Pranksy
Pranksy is an anonymous collector and a dominant
figure and investm ent influencer in the NFT space.
The latest offering being the NFT Boxes project that
represents an interesting bundling event.
As per a Twitter pos t by Pranksy the bundles were
sold within 6 minutes. The statistics on the top
secondary markets OpenSea shows big sales too.
There were 200 ETH sales made within the last 24
hours.

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Source: Pranksy Twitter Post
Hashmasks is the leading NFT
platform on Ethereum
Hashmasks shook the industry recently generating
more than $9 million in transaction volume just 4 –
days after launch. While it is too early to make any
conclusions the project has already gath ered a lot of
attention gaining first place according to DappRadar
rankings .

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Source: DappRadar
At the time of writing, Hashmasks NFTs are the
number 1 collectible dapp across all platforms on
DappRadar and number 4 across all Ethereum dapp
categories within the last 24hrs. I nterestingly,
Hashmasks is the only collectibles dapp in the top 5.
January in -summary
To conclude, Ethereum’s scalability issues persisted,
and as a result, Layer 1 and 2 solutions are becoming
more and more popular.
Nevertheless, Ethereum remains the mo st significant
blockchain with impressive darts to 2021 for both the
DeFi and NFTs categories.
Although the recent all -time high total value locked
was mainly driven by token price increases, the real
growth was still noticeable. aTVL surpassed 14 billion
at the end of January.

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BSC had the best month so far in terms of both
unique active wallets and transaction volumes;
activity was mainly driven by DeFi dapps.
The NFT sector also proved to have lots of potential.
Not only well -known projects such as Cryp toPunks
reached all -time high sales but industry newbies also
showed impressive performances.
The Flow dapp NBA Top Shot within four months of
existence became the biggest NFT dapp in terms of
total sales.
Overall, it seems that the blockchain industry is
heading to the next wave of growth – NFT dapps.