On Thursday, Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, said that the network supports more than 50 decentralized applications (dApps) and is on track to reach 80 dApps in the short-term.
The statement of Sun follows a major milestone achieved by the blockchain network earlier this month, achieving 100 million transactions in 173 days, averaging 578,034 transactions per day.
In August, Martin Köppelmann, the founder of Ethereum-based prediction market platform Gnosis.ph, said that an important statistic to reference in measuring the rate of growth of a smart contract protocol is the usage of dApps and the number of dApps that interact with each other.
Köppelmann said :
The numbers we care about is the usage of decentralized applications. And as a next step, the number to look out for is DAPPs that seemlessly interact with each other and draw a benefit from being on the same platform. As a side effect, ultimately the price of ETH will then be a function of the demand for the use of applications in this reliable, open, and interlinked environment.
Like Ethereum, TRON is a smart contract protocol and its value comes from its ecosystem of dApps and active users.
According to DappRadar, a platform that provides data on the dApp usage of major smart contract protocols, the top three dApps on TRON have 2,300 users on average, with TRONbet recording 2,500 active users and 2 million transactions per day.
In contrast, Ethereum’s top three dApps has 700 users on average, with IDEX, ForkDelta, and My Crypto Heroes ranking as the network’s three biggest dApps.
EOS, the second most valuable smart contract protocol in the global market behind Ethereum, has the highest number of dApp users on its protocol. PRA CandyBox EOS Knights and EOSBet have nearly 5,000 users on average, more than the dApp users of Tron and Ethereum combined.
Possibly fueled by the acquisition of BitTorrent by the foundation, the dApp usage of the TRON network has recently surpassed Ethereum in terms of daily number of users and dApps.
EOS and TRON have also focused more on scalability in their development over the past several months with an objective to support as many dApps as possible in the ecosystem.
This week, we have seen an explosive increase of DApps on TRON, with many DApp releases within a week. The DAUs of the newly launched TRON Shrimp Farm and Ant Farmer have made new records among all the Dapps. According to DAppRadar, TRON Shrimp Farm has a DAU of 15,000, surpassing the previous record number at 2,000 which TRONBet has created,
the TRON team said .
TRON has seen a rapid increase in the number of dApps and dApp users throughout the last quarter of 2018. But, considering that its mainnet only launched in May, it remains uncertain whether the network will be able to sustain the current level of growth over the long run.