A study on ĐApps characteristics

Abstract

Repositories are important indicators for liveness and maturity in software development communities. They host user-facing applications or re-usable artefacts to build such applications. While rarely decentralised themselves, they are important for hosting code for decentralized applications. In this study, we investigate public repositories dedicated to decentralised applications, or ĐApps, executing on heterogeneous blockchain platforms. The study is the first to report aggregated metrics on the repository-level and application-level characteristics including ĐApps metadata, associated smart contracts composition and inconsistencies between repositories in both schema and content. The main contributions are data acquisition tools and an evolving public dataset along with an initial analysis to derive key metrics in a reproducible way. Insights provided encompass the dominance of Ethereum, the absence of smart contracts for a significant portion of applications, and unused application advertisement potential by absence from popular repositories. The insights can be exploited by developers to build high-quality and highly popular applications and set up corresponding quality checks.