DEV Community

Cover image for How do dApps Make Money
Aun Suhel
Aun Suhel

Posted on

How do dApps Make Money

Lets have a look at how do dapps make money through various models.

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 a token.

If you plan on taking the route, you will have to keep following things into consideration –

The main functionality of your decentralized app

Provide access to the network

Distribute profit to the token holders

2. Transaction Fees

Another model that is present in almost all the guides on monetization of dApps is charging transaction fees. Charging users for availing your service can be one of the most profitable ways to make money by developing dapps.

This is how one of the most popular ways to monetize your Ethereum dApps work –

A purchases something from B on your platform

X% of the amount goes to you – the service provider

100 – X% then goes to B

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 too add the monetization functionality in your app to answer the investors’ persistent question on how to make money with dapps.

If yours is a gaming app too, you can add the model and offer players a chance to up their game without working on the levels by buying the premium functionality using digital currency.

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.

The time frame of this subscription can be:

Usage-based – The users would only be allowed to call function X times

Time-based – Users would be allowed to call in a function till X time passes

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 app development makes money.

So, you should think about adding it to your list of dApp monetization strategies.

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.

What CryptoKitties did is that they developed generation 0 kitties and gave them to the platform users to keep as a collectible. By making the kitties functional and unique and viral trending, they were able to attract users to put their money in the digital good.

8. Referral Marketing

Referral marketing that has proven to be behind e-commerce app 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 website to promote. And depending on the clicks or traffic you are able to send their way, you get paid by them.

The answer to how do dapps make money is best given by a mobile app development company.

Oldest comments (0)