When you are building a digital product or service for your business, there are three primary network architectures you will have to consider: centralized, distributed and decentralized. While blockchain technologies are often based on decentralized networks, blockchain app development itself cannot be categorized as a decentralized application. This article introduces you with the best dApps to make money, various aspects of monetizing models for your dApps and tells you how to make money with dApps.
What are Decentralized Applications (dApps)?
Decentralized applications are software that interact with the blockchain in DeFi (Decentralized Finance) keeping track of the state of all network participants. dApps have the same interface as any other website or mobile application today however their core functionality is represented by smart contracts. This is probably why a decentralized app is equitable to every business scale and is one of the most practiced blockchain trends in the industry vertical.
dApps do not follow the standard monetization strategies for regular business apps, instead they rely on token launch activities, initial coin offerings, donations and transaction fees for money making strategies.
Here’s a difference between traditional app money-making and monetizing through dApps;
There are already major dApps with massive user bases such as Empire, Augur, Basic Attention Token, Compound etc, that carry multiple sources of revenue for a viable business model. What are these sources of revenue? Let’s take a look;
How Do Decentralized Apps Make Money?
The answer to how to make money with dApp takes startups and enterprises through many routes. Following are the unique revenue earning models for businesses with dApps:
1. Crowdsale and token launch
The foremost dApp business and revenue model to consider is to bootstrap a project through crowdsale and back it with an asset token.
2. Transaction fees
Another answer to can you make money with dApps is that the transaction fees model, you will find in all the dApps monetization guides. Charging users for availing your service can be one of the most profitable ways to make money by developing dapps.
The caveat here is to know what percent of transaction fees to set. If you allot a high amount, someone will eventually copy your smart contract and offer their own version with a less to zero transaction fees.
3. Premium
Taking cues from the traditional, non-decentralized gaming apps, you can add the monetization functionality in your app to answer the investors’ persistent question on how to make money with dapps.
4. Subscription
You can easily add a membership or subscription element in the contract to ensure that the function has only been called upon by subscribers or the premium members.
5. Advertisements
While still a very new/ less used blockchain business and monetization model, advertisements do in fact find a place in the answer to how decentralized exchange app development makes money.
6. Donations
If your dApp project is out to solve some world issue or to function around some social cause, you can put a donate button on your application or website or can even pass its link around to social entrepreneurs to donate.
7. Create digital goods
One of the biggest examples of how Ethereum apps make money using this monetization model can be seen in CryptoKitties.
8. Referral marketing
Referral marketing that has proven to be behind e-commerce apps’ success can also be taken into consideration to make money with Ethereum based decentralized applications. In fact, there are a number of Blockchain powered platforms on the internet today that give you a link to their websites to promote. And depending on the clicks or traffic you are able to send their way, you get paid by them.
Industrial dApps and Their Monetization Models
Experts suggest that it is crucial for businesses to follow respective monetization models that suit their business process well. In addition to this, here are a few examples of dApps generating revenues in various sectors:
1. Gaming dApps
2. Decentralized exchange apps
3. Marketplaces
4. Payment dApps
dApps low development cost, reliability and high security, make it an irreparable business approach for future applications. Now,all you need to do is find reliable dapp development services for your dApp development.
