DappRadar shuts down: The "professionalism trap" of data platforms

Author: Eric, Foresight News

Original Title: DappRadar, Another Tear of the Era

On the evening of November 17, 2025, DappRadar, which had accompanied the industry for nearly 8 years, announced that it would gradually shut down its services and would no longer track blockchain and DApp data.

It is often said that "a grain of sand from the era, when it falls on an individual, is a mountain." This could not be more apt to describe DappRadar. Born in an era when the "blockchain is dead" narrative was at its loudest, DappRadar accompanied Web3 from its infancy to its coming of age, but ultimately could not survive the pains of a regime change. The exit of such products, marked by the era, reminds me of what the Nokia CEO said at the end of the press conference when it was acquired by Microsoft 11 years ago:

"We didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost."

Back Then, the Data Websites We Used Together

Many newcomers to the Web3 industry may not know that DappRadar was once a very important and authoritative data source. In addition to being cited by CoinDesk and Chinese Web3 media, DappRadar data was also frequently referenced by traditional mainstream Western media such as Bloomberg, Forbes, and the BBC.

The reason it was considered authoritative is that before the rise of professional data websites (such as Nansen, Arkham, DefiLlama, etc.) and specialized Web3 marketing tools (such as Cyber, Kaito, etc.), DappRadar was almost the must-visit portal for all DApps in its early days. The completeness of its project listings made its data both comprehensive and credible, making it virtually the only and best way to quickly learn basic information about new projects at the time.

DappRadar co-founder Skirmantas Januskas is from Lithuania. Unlike many industry leaders who wear multiple hats, since February 2018, he has focused solely on DappRadar. Before that, he only briefly worked as a software developer at NFQ. Another co-founder, Dunica Dragos, was an operator at the American gaming giant EA in his early years, and after founding DappRadar, he also devoted himself exclusively to it.

DappRadar received two rounds of investment. In the seed round in September 2019, DappRadar received $2.23 million from Naspers, Blockchain Ventures, and Angel Invest Berlin. Naspers is the South African multinational media group that, in 2001, spent $32 million to acquire a 46.5% stake in Tencent from Richard Li, IDG, and others. Later, in May 2021, DappRadar received $4.94 million in Series A funding from Blockchain.com Ventures, Prosus Ventures, and NordicNinja VC.

I found a record of Skirmantas Januskas being interviewed after completing the financing in 2019. At that time, Web3 was at its darkest moment, but Skirmantas was full of confidence in the industry, believing that as long as the problems of user experience and finding user needs were solved, "centralized applications would become a thing of the past."

In 2019, this passionate "rookie" shared his insights on DeFi, gaming, and other tracks, which eventually exploded in 2021. Although most of the DeFi data pie was taken by DefiLlama, DappRadar's comprehensiveness and deep cultivation of emerging concepts such as NFT, GameFi, and the metaverse allowed it to have millions of users at its peak. Some small projects that couldn't even be found on Twitter could be seen on DappRadar with DAU fluctuating between 0 and 3.

Professionalism Became the Biggest Original Sin

If one must summarize the biggest reason for DappRadar's failure, it would be being too crypto native and neglecting the importance of commercialization.

To this day, if you open DappRadar's homepage, you'll find that the categories it displays, apart from the original ones like gaming, DeFi, NFT, gambling, and the newly added AI, RWA, and social, do not include popular themes like meme coins. That's why I call Skirmantas a "rookie"—even in the NFT track, he insisted on publishing a detailed report every quarter and continued tracking obscure airdrops, yet missed almost all the hot trends.

In the past two years, DappRadar could be said to be the only platform covering all long-tail sectors and projects in Web3, but the problem is it seemed to focus only on the tail end.

This kind of obsessive professionalism can indeed provide Bloomberg and Forbes with high-quality material for a report, but it has no commercial value. The RADAR token launched after the 2021 financing, apart from subscribing to Pro services, staking, and voting, did not seem to have a better use case, and even blocked the best source of subscription revenue.

The image built on comprehensiveness in the early days gradually became a shackle later on. DappRadar's professionalism in DeFi couldn't match DefiLlama, its token information seemed inferior to CMC, and its research depth couldn't reach the level of Bankless. The only thing it did best, the NFT track, became stagnant. However, I believe DappRadar itself realized these problems early on, so it also accelerated commercialization, including providing premium data via API and offering advertising slots.

After the 2021 financing, DappRadar lasted another 4 years. Besides the financing itself, it must have generated some revenue through traffic monetization, but obviously, this income was still insufficient compared to the costs required to provide massive data for exponential growth. In addition, since 2023, although the market has continued to rise, there have not been many projects with sufficient budgets, and the limited budgets have been spent more on KOLs, exchanges, and some emerging platforms. DappRadar, left behind, found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.

As mentioned before, its coverage was too long-tail, to the point where project teams could hardly judge what kind of users would refer to DappRadar's information under what circumstances. In the early days, DappRadar provided a channel to learn about new projects, but after the big shakeout, channels to learn about the few "high-quality projects" became increasingly widespread, and the old guard was no longer the only or best choice.

Compared to the simple website of two or three years ago, today's DappRadar is all-encompassing but appears chaotic, which is a sign of overexertion in commercialization, as reflected in the farewell letter's "exhausting all possibilities." For DappRadar, without continuous funding or endless financing, it needed to show restraint in content selection and advertising display on the website. DappRadar's excessive insistence on professionalism or "orthodoxy," and its later content and ad overload after realizing the problem, exposed its lack of operational capability.

Besides its own shortcomings, Web3 data and information platforms are inherently difficult businesses. Today, with multi-chain data exploding, the costs of indexing and servers are soaring, and while there is high demand for quality data, there is a lack of matching payment capability. Without other sources of income, relying solely on ads and selling APIs inevitably leads to competition. Platforms with low pricing power increase ad density to survive, reducing user experience, and decline seems inevitable.

DappRadar's seven-year trajectory encapsulates the common commercialization challenges of such projects: high value, low payment, rigid costs, and fast narrative iteration. Its shutdown leaves a clear lesson for those who come after: if the business model cannot close the loop from day one, even the most authoritative data cannot prevent "bleeding to death."