DappRadar, a blockchain data platform that has witnessed the rise and fall of the entire decentralized application ecosystem, announced its permanent closure in its seventh year. This blockchain analytics platform, born from the CryptoKitties craze and once hailed as the "Web3 Google" by millions of users, will completely cease operations in just a few days. Following the news, its token RADAR plummeted by 38%, hitting a low of $0.00064.
How did a once foundational industry infrastructure find itself in a state of financial unsustainability?
The story begins at the end of 2017. That winter, a blockchain game called CryptoKitties suddenly exploded in popularity, clogging the Ethereum network within just a few weeks.
Two young Lithuanians, programmers Skirmantas Januškas and Dragos Dunica, both in their twenties, keenly captured this phenomenon.
Skirmantas had worked as a developer at the international software outsourcing company NFQ, where he was adept at data scraping and visualization; Dragos leaned more towards product and growth, and the two had met through online gaming when they were just 12 years old.
Thus, on a weekend in February 2018, driven by passion, they created DappRadar 1.0 in just three days, a simple website that listed all Ethereum DApps.
The emergence of DappRadar provided the industry with its first cross-chain, verifiable, and unified data directory. At its peak, it tracked hundreds of public chains, becoming a daily data source for millions of users, investment institutions, and developers. Over seven years, DappRadar expanded from a single Ethereum chain to support over 90 chains, tracking more than 18,000 DApps, with monthly active users peaking over a million. During the bull market peak in 2021, it completed a multi-million dollar funding round led by institutions like Naspers and Lightspeed, reaching a valuation of several hundred million dollars at one point.
DappRadar's influence extended far beyond mere ranking lists.
During the DeFi Summer of 2020, it was one of the first platforms to notice the surge in Uniswap's daily active users; in the NFT craze of 2021, its NFT valuation tool made countless players realize for the first time that their CryptoPunks were worth several ETH; in the bear market of 2022, it was also one of the first to raise alarms about Terra/Luna. Even traditional financial institutions used DappRadar's on-chain data as a reference for assessing the risks of crypto assets.
However, the greater the influence, the higher the operational costs. Real-time data scraping from over 90 chains requires maintaining hundreds of nodes, paying high RPC fees, and combating increasingly rampant bot traffic. Founder Dragos candidly stated in an AMA in 2024: "We have to filter out over 90% of the fake trading volume every day, which costs ten times more than scraping real data."
By 2025, more funds were flowing into trading platforms, RWA, and AI+crypto narratives, while the funding environment for pure analytics tools deteriorated sharply. In DappRadar's DAO treasury, 97% of the assets were the plummeting RADAR tokens, with only $46,000 left in stablecoins, burning $15,000 a month, and with less than three months of runway.
"We explored all options," the two founders wrote in their announcement. This understated statement belies countless rounds of layoffs, salary cuts, and business contractions. Ultimately, they chose to exit gracefully.
From an industry perspective, DappRadar's downfall is not coincidental but rather a concentrated explosion of structural contradictions in the blockchain data sector. On the surface, the more chains there are, the more the data platform should benefit. But the reality is quite the opposite.
With each additional chain comes another data standard, another set of APIs, and another batch of node costs. The multi-chain era brings exponential costs rather than exponential growth; truly high-quality, cleaned data requires substantial maintenance costs.
Thus, a paradox emerged in the industry: users want free data, while regulators and institutions demand high compliance and precision, and data companies need to commercialize to sustain operations. It is challenging to find a natural balance among the three.
A deeper contradiction lies in the fact that this is a narrative-driven industry, but the infrastructure is not the protagonist of the narrative. The NFT, GameFi, and DeFi booms of 2020-2021 raised the tide for data platforms. However, when the narrative shifted to AI, RWA, and infrastructure development, data analysis tools were suddenly diminished. In the crypto industry, narrative is always the strongest traffic entry point, not tools.
DappRadar's fate is just another testament to this rule. After DappRadar's closure, the industry faces a critical question: is there still a need for cross-chain data platforms?
The market will not disappear, but the landscape may become fragmented. In the short term, it will be difficult for any project to attempt to become a "full-chain data center." What may emerge in the future are: deep analysis tools focused on a single ecosystem; specialized data services for financial transactions; and internal analysis systems provided by exchanges or large infrastructure players.
Additionally, large regulatory bodies and major companies will further occupy the upstream, with firms like Chainalysis, Nansen, and Elliptic, which have stable income structures, continuing to solidify their positions. Data will no longer be a community tool but rather a high-threshold service.
As AI's capabilities in data processing continue to improve, the role of traditional unified platforms may be diminished. Future data processing may no longer rely on unified platforms like DappRadar but instead be automatically scraped, cleaned, and standardized by AI tools.
DappRadar's closure forces the industry to confront a harsh reality: the blockchain world seeks transparency, but the infrastructure supporting that transparency is so fragile.
The blockchain industry in 2025 stands at a crossroads. Transparency remains important, but who will bear the cost of that transparency? Infrastructure is still key, but how will the business model for infrastructure be reshaped? Multi-chain is still a trend, but who will define the "common language" of the multi-chain era?
DappRadar cannot provide the answers. But its downfall compels the entire industry to start answering these questions.
Related: After the platform announced its closure, DappRadar's token price plummeted.
Original article: “Why did DappRadar shut down after just 7 years, once hailed as the 'Web3 Google' by millions of users?”
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