Meet Skirmantas Januškas, CEO and Co-Founder at Dapp Discovery Platform: DappRadar

Skirmantas Januškas

We spoke with Skirmantas Januškas, CEO and co-founder of DappRadar. Hailing from Lithuania and previously a software developer at international software development company NFQ, Skirmantas joined the crypto and dapps space in 2017. A firm believer in crypto’s potential to overhaul the current system and usher in a truly shared, decentralised economy, he co-founded DappRadar with Dragos Dunica in February 2018 as a step in this direction. The company has since attracted more than $7M in venture capital funding and become a gateway to DeFi for over half a million users across the globe. His mission — to give everyone the opportunity to grow and manage their wealth via dapps.

DappRadar is the leading global app store for decentralised apps (dapps) which makes it easy for its base of more than 500,000 users per month to track, analyse, and discover dapp activity via its online platform. The platform currently hosts 5,265 dapps from more than 20 protocols and offers a plethora of consumer-friendly tools including comprehensive NFT valuation, portfolio management and daily industry-leading, actionable insight.
 
 

 

Tell us about DappRadar and how you came up with the idea for the company.

 
In a nutshell, DappRadar is a one-stop shop for decentralised apps — a place to discover, gain insight on, and manage dapps from across different categories, protocols, and asset classes, ranging from NFTs, to Decentralised Finance (DeFi), even gaming. We’re blockchain-agnostic, so we work with a wide variety of cryptocurrencies and exchanges. Importantly, DappRadar differs from traditional app stores in that you not only passively discover dapps and top-performing tokens, but can also manage your portfolio and trade your digital assets on-site. We offer our users the opportunity to react immediately to the insights we provide, which is vital in the dynamic space that crypto is.

The idea for DappRadar came over a weekend, but it had been slowly brewing for several years. Dragos and I were both into gaming and exploring crypto, and when CryptoKitties gained popularity in 2017, we saw a concept that addressed one of the core issues in traditional gaming — that of ownership of the assets you earn while playing. NFTs entering the space meant that the era of centralised gaming monopolies was coming to an end, that anyone and everyone could own and monetise their gaming assets. We wanted to give our community the data and tools to do so. And as the crypto industry grows and opens an entirely new world of opportunities, we continue to upgrade and transform DappRadar to meet our users’ increasingly complex needs.
 

 

How has the company evolved in the last year?

 
While the pandemic has had devastating effects on many industries, it was quite the opposite for the digital assets space and its key players, DappRadar included. Crypto’s total market cap went from around $250M in March 2020 to $2.5B this May. We’ve followed the same curve.

The DappRadar team has almost doubled since March 2020, with 50+ team members across Europe and Asia. We secured $5 million in Series A funding in May this year. Our product line-up has expanded substantially to offer a suite of proprietary features, including the Portfolio Tracker and Token Swap exchange, that allow our now 500,000+ users to act upon the insight we provided them with. We’ve also vastly expanded our data aggregation operations to provide even deeper, broader and more up-to-date insight, packaged into industry reports that have cemented our position as the go-to source for decentralized finance market data.

This is no small feat, but it’s only the groundwork for our goal of creating the app store of the future — a truly decentralised, data-driven and community-governed marketplace where you build and manage your fortune according to your own needs, a self-sufficient, circular economy of equal rights and equal participation.
 

What can we hope to see from DappRadar in the future?

 
We dream big. In the future, DappRadar will be the entry point into a new, decentralised economy. We’re working towards changing the world, one feature and dataset at a time. How near is this future? My estimate is five years or less.

In the immediate future, expect to see an even broader array of products and features from DappRadar, each geared at democratising finance by giving every individual across the world access to the financial insight and tools so far only accessible to large corporations and family offices.

What will not change at DappRadar, but will only be reinforced, is our mission to build products inspired and driven by and serving the community.