Application vs Platforms
It is the platforms that were essentially the locomotives of the ICO wave; at first, Ethereum gathered $18M, followed by EOS - $185M, Bancor - $153M, Tezos - $232M, and finally, Filecoin with $257M.
However, the death of a hype is inevitable (for there is no such thing as an eternal hype) and many people commenced to understand that it is too difficult to make platforma platform is way too difficult. Besides, there is not a lot of space in the platform world, because in reality, there is no need for so many platforms.
Applications, written on these platforms, are a whole other case altogether. Multi-million ICOs and anti-cryptocurrency actions of leading countries have popularized the existing cryptocurrencies and their corresponding platforms, resulting in the possibility to offer the next step for this audience.
From the results of a recent online survey, conducted over the course of one week from January 11th to January 18th of 2018, SurveyMonkey and Global Blockchain Business Council, with the participation of 5,761 US citizens, revealed that 6 out of 10 Americans have heard about bitcoin, while 5% of the respondents own it. In other words, about 195M people in the United States are potential clients, while 16M are simply waiting for an opportunity to spend their cryptocurrency in real life.
In the previously proposed doctrine, Fat Protocols, it states that protocols in the Blockchain ecosystem hold a more significant weight than applications because they are of more value, unlike TCP/IP and HTTP in Web.
However, in the context of application, it seems more practical to overlook protocols and consider platforms such as Ethereum, on the base of which there are already many applications.
If we take a look at the history, then perhaps it would be useful to see the dynamics of the amount of applications on the App Store, which, in the year 2018, also became a revolutionary platform.
The number of applications according to the data provided by the AppLiftorganization:
As of January 17, 2018, already 2.2M applications are available on the App Store, according to www.statista.com.
Take into account that the number of games at the very beginning was close to 50% and only then the percentage commenced to gradually decrease to 20%. The truth is that the story of the recent popularity of Cryptokitties portrays similarity with the data on the graph.
Undoubtedly, we will yet see new breakthroughs in the platforms, for it is only the beginning. But nevertheless, it is plausible that real applications will abruptly gain momentum in 2018.
