Dapp Industry Grew by 10% in May Despite DeFi Declines

According to DappRadar’s monthly industry report, the decentralized application industry grew by 9.97% in May. It has reached an average of 1,967,051 daily unique active wallets (dUAW), the paper added.

The research attributed the growth to the gaming sector and decentralized finance (DeFi), however, the latter has seen a decline in total value locked.

These sectors continued to “exhibit promising signs of growth and stability, further asserting the importance of this thriving industry,” it noted.

Gaming Dapps Dominant

The gaming sector was dominant, with 36% of all dapp activity and 711,913 dUAW. It grew by 5.97% in May from the previous month. Blockchain gaming also had 77% dominance over the transactions of the entire dapp industry, with 550 million transactions, the report said.

Unique active DeFi wallets increased by 18% to 607,945, giving the sector a 31% dapp market share. Social dapps was the third largest sector of the industry, with a 12% dominance but a 5% decline in dUAW for the month.

However, the report noted a decline in DeFi total value locked for the month:

“Despite the growing hype and increased adoption of DeFi protocols, the TVL presents a contrasting narrative, experiencing a 4.3% decrease, dropping to $79.16 billion.”

DeFiLlama has a different figure for TVL at $52.74 billion, but it confirms that the figure fell in May.

BNB Chain was the market leader for dapp activity, with an 8.68% increase to reach 532,056 dUAW.

“Interestingly, the observed increase in dUAW occurred in blockchains offering DeFi products,” the report observed.

Stargate Finance was the most popular dapp for the month in terms of dUAW, with just over two million. As a result, it has now surpassed PancakeSwap for this metric, following a 40% increase in users in May.

Crypto Market Outlook

Crypto markets also declined in May, with total market capitalization falling by 2%. However, markets traded mostly sideways for the month, and they continue to do so as the week ends.

The total cap was up 0.9% on the day to $1.18 trillion at the time of writing. BTC had made marginal gains to top $27,000 again, while ETH was up 1.5% to $1,883.

Low volumes and volatility have kept crypto assets tightly range-bound, but on-chain data suggests a breakout is imminent.