For many years, it has been difficult for Web3 apps to provide users with a seamless experience to enable wide adoption. But, given the current trend, Web3 apps are now becoming better and better at providing a user experience closer to the standards of Web2. In the next 18 months, some Web3 apps will likely reach millions of daily active users. That was hard to believe just a year ago and will become the new reality.

The only app that managed to break through over a million daily active users (DAUs) was the Sweatcoin app. However, before issuing a token, it focused solely on a web2 architecture. Hopefully, we will see more web3 native apps breaking these numbers soon. I researched the current number of DAUs for Defi mobile apps like Coinbase and Metamask since Defi is the most popular application with a product-market fit on the blockchain. The graph below shows that their activity is still below a million DAUs. We can argue that a more relevant metric for these Defi apps should be the number of monthly transacting users. So far, they are among the most adopted mobile apps in the blockchain space.

Unified app DAUs (iOS + Android) for Sweatcoin, MetaMask and Coinbase

Nodle with its DePiN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) application on mobile has doubled its daily active users to 100,000 DAUs in the past few months. Similarly, Warpcast, the Farcaster client is off to a good start. As indicated in this Techcrunch post, Farcaster reached 140,000 users joining the network but it is still early to access reliable daily activitity numbers.

Nodle App (NODL wallet on iOS and Android) growth — Source: Amplitude

It is unlikely that future successful native web3 apps will be able to scale fast and support over a million DAUs without economics that can work and a blockchain infrastructure that can handle the volume of transactions required.

Blockchain Focus is shifting from Layer 1 to Layer 2

In this graph below I make reference to the graph made by Joel Monegro from Placeholder who wrote about the blockchain application stack in Coindesk back in 2021. At the time he explains that in 10 years all apps would end up running on the Bitcoin network. Since Ethereum is getting a lot of traction with the forecasted ETF funds and given its dynamic developer ecosystem, I tend to think Bitcoin won’t be the only Layer 1 network in 7 years from now. It may also take a lot of time for Layer 2 networks on Bitcoin to get to the level of maturity reached by Ethereum for enabling developers to build all kind of applications. Other networks like Solana or Polkadot are also in the race to support this new generation of applications but both havn’t enabled the creation of Layer 2 networks. Solana is focused on supporting all applications on its Layer 1 since scalability is part of its commercial advantage together with low transactions fees. Polkadot on the other hand, plans to stop the support for parachains and wants to bring applications to its new Core Time proposition to sell block space. Its Core Time solution seems very comparable to Ethereum with Layer 2 networks.

When I look at the graph above that doesn’t even mention all Layer 1 networks in activity today, I forecast that they will end up competing to lower the cost of records and space on the blocks they produce to have a chance to stay relevant in the future.

That’s not the only relevant criteria; the maturity of the developer ecosystem, the availability of development tools, the interoperability, and the access to capital based on the different ecosystems are all important.

With Layer 2 growing role to support the Web3 apps that will enable millions of users to interact with the blockchains on a daily basis it is clear that most of the biggest opportunities will be coming from teams building apps on that layer.

Nodle and the Click App

Nodle’s latest application Click is a camera application that enables anyone to capture a photo or a video and prove its authenticity by making a record on the blockchain for free. Adoption of the beta version is early, but the team behind Nodle believes there is a good chance that Click could be among the first web3 apps to be adopted by millions of users this year. Given the rise of AI-generated content, the number of deep fakes, and the global political context with 50 countries going under elections in 2024, the demand for such tools should skyrocket 🚀 We call authentic media content created on Click Deep Reals as referenced in here https://anthenor.com/deep-reals-how-digital-authenticity-delivers-real-world-trust