Ethereum has struggled to see the emergence of practical and widely utilized applications over the past two years, despite its $1.2 bln market cap. Some analysts expect a new wave of decentralized applications to make progress in the upcoming months.
In an interview, Akasha CEO and Ethereum founder Mihai Alisie, attributed the prediction of decentralized application resurgence to the growth of the Ethereum development community and optimism of startup incubators towards the potential of Ethereum applications.
Alisie further noted that Ethereum applications such as Aragon, uPort, Ethlance and Raiden Network are beginning to make their debut, after seeing significant progress in the development, alpha and beta testing phases.
The first wave of Ethereum applications failed to satisfy
The first wave of Ethereum-based decentralized applications such as Augur, Hedgy, Arcade City and Swarm, which have all garnered multi-million dollar investments through venture capital firms and crowdfunding campaigns, have struggled to satisfy the public.
Since early 2015, Swarm has struggled to make actual progress in securing wide user base of its decentralized file storage platform. Augur, the decentralized prediction market founded by Joey Krug, a Peter Thiel fellowship member, have also been quite unsuccessful in living up to its hype.
With the demise of the DAO, Ethereum investors feared that the network, which prioritizes flexibility and functionality, will not be able to see unique and useful decentralized applications that can take the network to a new commercial level with the actual user base and active operations.
The new generation of decentralized applications
Currently, the eyes of the investors of Ethereum are on the new generation decentralized applications. Applications such as uPort, the next-generation identity system developed by ConsenSys and decentralized job market platform Ethlance have become highly anticipated projects within the Ethereum community, with the expectation that they will be able to secure and maintain an active user base utilizing the Ethereum network to solve actual real-life problems.
The business model and strategy of Ethlance, in particular, is exciting, specifically because it is a fully decentralized job market platform with the absence of service fees and memberships. Unlike centralized job hunting platforms, Ethlance is a transparent application which allows users to find jobs, get hired, create invoices and receive salaries in Ether on the same platform.
Ethlance doesn’t take a percentage cut from any user involved in the process, including both the employer and employee. More importantly, without memberships, anyone within the network is eligible to apply to an unlimited number of jobs and the only requirement users must comply with is the Ethereum gas fees, which is equivalent to transaction fees in the Bitcoin network.
Ethereum is in urgent need of next-generation decentralized applications that can serve and maintain a real and active user base of people utilizing the Ethereum network to solve real-world problems.