The decentralized application industry pushed above $40 billion in smart contract deposits in February 2021, and currently the figure stands at $59 billion. To date, “real money” continues to flow into the sector, and on Aug. 29, gaming startup Limit Break raised $200 million. The project gained popularity after the successful launch of its DigiDaigaku free-mint NFT collection.

According to a report by Dove Metrics and Messari, the crypto industry saw $30.3 billion in funds raised in H1 2022. This amount surpassed the $30.2 billion seen in 2021. Excluding the $10.2 billion in funding raised for the centralized finance sector leaves a whopping $20 billion that was invested in DApps, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and Web 3 infrastructure.

One might question how much of that money has effectively been deployed or reinvested in ventures owned by the same investment groups. Of course, there are a handful of clever ways to overextend those announcement numbers without breaking any regulation, but there's undoubtedly a great deal of money flowing toward decentralized applications.

There’s always been a healthy amount of distrust in the actual number of active users on DApps, but so far, no hard evidence of cheating has been presented. So what tools can retail users employ to detect inflated activity? Well, it turns out there are at least three: active users, community engagement and liquidity.

Most proof of stake (PoS) networks charge minimal registration fees and many are free to use. This leads to troves of “fake” active addresses that interact with the DApp and it creates incentives for developers and investors to boost their numbers.

Filtering the DApps rankings by the number of users brings some staggering data, especially in the