Daily DApp Users Surges To New High In February As DEX Activity Soars

Daily active dApp users surged to a new all-time high for the second consecutive month in February, according to a new report from DappRadar.

According to the March 7 report, an average of 6.7 million wallets interacted with decentralized applications each day last month. The activity beat out January’s previous record of 5.3 million by 26.4%.

GameFi projects continued to boast the largest share of dApp users, with blockchain games hosting a 20% monthly increase to 1.87 million active wallets, equating to 28% of daily dApp users in February. Three of the four most popular dApps represented the gaming sector, with MotoDEX, Sweat Economy, and Hot Game hosting 6.7 million, 3.75 million, and 1.82 million monthly users respectively.

DeFi users trended sideways for the month, with roughly 1 million wallets engaging with DeFi dApps each day. However, decentralized exchanges (DEXes) made up four of the month’s top ten dApps, with Jupiter Exchange, SyncSwap, Uniswap v3, and PancakeSwap v3 hosting between 1.1 million and 1.25 million users each.

DEXes hosted nearly $50B worth of trade during the week of Feb. 25, the highest level in 11 months.

The spike in dApp activity coincided with Bitcoin and Ethereum posting several multi-year price highs last month, culminating in BTC posting new all-time highs earlier this week.

The surge in crypto prices propelled DEXes into the dApp leaderboard by users, with many traders also chasing the eye-watering gains coming out of the memecoin segment — for which the market cap has nearly tripled since mid-January.

The user base for both NFT protocols and SocialFI dApps averaged roughly 1 million daily, marking growth of 24% and 12% respectively.

No definitive leader among NFT marketplaces

NFT marketplaces continue to vie for dominance despite volume falling 14% month-over-month to $1.3 billion, although total NFT sales count posted a slight uptick of 1.5% to 5.23 million. Monthly NFT volume has now dipped 27.5% since posting a local high of $1.8 billion in December.

Blur is the top exchange by volume with a 50% market share from 58,000 traders, but hosted just 4% of sales. While Blur usurped OpenSea to become entrenched as the top marketplace by volume last year, the platform faces competition from a growing number of prominent rivals.

Magic Eden’s volume doubled to $189M or 14% dominance, also hosting 139,000 traders. The jump in activity came amid the run-up to the launch of its Ethereum deployment in partnership with Yuga Labs on Feb. 27.

While OpenSea hosted ranked fourth by volume with $116M the platform leads by number of users with 201,000 traders. OKX also remains a viable contender in spite of its volume pulling back 36% to $117 million from 58,000 users.