dApp Bankruptcy

In 2013 when I first got into Crypto, the main program you used was a wallet and it was very simple. You send tokens and look at your balance. Since Bitcoin was the only token I was holding, I really didn’t need anything more than a balance.

By 2016, more and more coins were gaining popularity. All of a sudden you were holding multiple tokens like Dash, Monero, and Litecoin. This meant that you had to go from one asset to multiple assets. During this time, sites like CoinMarketCap became really popular.

2017 really changed everything with the explosion of ERC20s. Now that anyone could make a coin, there were new coins popping up faster than any centralized service could keep up with them. The main thing going for ERC20s was that they were still just tokens that had a balance and a price on a centralized exchange.

In 2019, Uniswap v2 changed everything again. Now, every ERC could have an instant price and instant liquidity without the need for a centralized exchange. DeFi also introduced apps that could perform financial operations on these tokens, adding to the complexity of tools you needed to keep track of and interact with your tokens.

By the peak of the bull market in 2021, there were so many dApps that it started to get really hard keeping track of which dApps did what, where the sites were, and what buttons to click on. A DeFi native can easily interact with about 40+ dApps a month in some way, shape, or form, and it’s too many. Most of these apps perform the same basic functions, they just have a custom (sometimes horrible) UI to interact with their contract onchain.

Today, I’m declaring dapp bankruptcy and I’m working on building a one-stop shop that unifies the most popular protocols under one product. If you want to see how bad the situation is yourself, open your wallet and see how many sites you’ve connected to.