Gambling persists as a primary use case for “the blockchain” into 2019, with almost half of the top 100 decentralized apps (dapps) still betting-related.

Blockchains EOS and TRON have also solidified themselves as competitors to Ethereum this year. Together, they make up 74 percent of the top 100 dapps ranked by daily user count, according to DappRadar data reviewed by Hard Fork on May 21.

While most of the top dapps run on EOS and TRON, a majority of those platforms are online casinos that offer blackjack, roulette, and other games of chance powered by cryptocurrency.

Indeed, 64 percent of TRON dapps featured in the top 100 were for gambling. Similarly, 51 percent of top EOS dapps allow users to bet cryptocurrency.

As far as Ethereum goes, 48 percent of its top dapps were blockchain-based games like CryptoKitties , and only 17 percent were related to gambling.

There were 74,567 dapp users on May 21

DappRadar data indicates these casino dapps are still very popular with users, as well as blockchain-based app developers.

On May 21, 33 percent of all users of top 100 dapps were cryptocurrency gamblers over the preceding 24 hours.

Interestingly, dapps categorized as “Other” seem to attract the most users, despite the amount of blockchain-based casinos currently operating.

These appear to be designed purely to distribute blockchain-based tokens in a variety of ways, such as rewarding users for posting and interacting with content.

Earlier this year, cryptocurrency gamblers (and their dapps) left the Ethereum en masse to gamble their digital assets on rival blockchains EOS and TRON.

A few months later, TRON founder Justin Sun urged dapp developers to refrain from launching gambling dapps in Japan to appease local regulators, but it’s still unclear whether those calls were effective.

These are the top 10 programming languages in blockchain

Okay, okay: we all know that blockchain and cryptocurrency developers are in demand these days, but what are the most popular programming languages in blockchain development?

It turns out that Ethereum‘s Solidity takes the top spot, followed by JavaScript and Java in second and third spot respectively, according to the most common blockchain-related questions on StackOverflow. To reach this conclusion, Hard Fork searched StackOverflow for entries tagged with the term “blockchain.”

In 2,724 questions referencing “blockchain,” Solidity appeared a total of 259 times. JavaScript was mentioned in 130 questions, followed by Java with 71 mentions. Python and Google‘s Go complete the top five, with 66 and 58 mentions respectively.

Here’s a graph showing the 10 most popular blockchain programming languages.

This means that nearly 10 percent of all blockchain-related entries on StackOverflow mentioned Solidity.

By contrast, JavaScript and Java appeared in 4.8 and 2.6 percent of all discussions on distributed ledger development.

Here is the top 10 breakdown of mentions by percentage:

For the record, the data collected by Hard Fork refers simply to posts tagged with the term “blockchain,” which means the total number of Solidity mentions on StackOverflow could be even higher; the same is true for any other entry on our graphs, the only exception is that Solidity is strictly a blockchain development language.

Blockchain vs non-blockchain development

Interestingly, Solidity does not even appear in the top 10 most popular (general) programming languages, according to StackOverflow’s 2019 developer survey . That makes sense, though – especially when you consider that blockchain still accounts for a small fraction of all software development.

It’s also worth noting that StackOverflow uses a different data collection methodology, so the comparison to the charts compiled by Hard Fork isn’t totally scientific.

That aside, there are some overlaps between the most popular blockchain programming languages and the most popular programming languages in general – six to be in total, including JavaScript (which rates pretty high in both charts), Java, Python, PHP, C#, and C++.

EOS, TRON, Monero, Augur handed out $24K in bug bounties this week alone

Cryptocurrency startups often tout blockchain technology for its immutability and heightened security, but in spite of such claims, even distributed ledgers are prone to flaws. Just this week alone, EOS, TRON, Monero, and Augur have handed out $24,500 in bug bounties to ethical hackers who found kinks in their software.

According to HackerOne data, security experts found a total of seven vulnerabilities: three in TRON, two in EOS, and one each Monero and Augur respectively. Unfortunately, most of these reports remain closed to the public, so it’s difficult to gauge how serious the issues were.

Here’s what we know though: EOS was the most generous bounty giver with a total of $12,500 in prize money, followed by Justin Sun’s TRON with $7,000, and Augur with $5,000. Monero has chosen not to disclose the size of the bounty.

Augur is the only company that has opted to make details of the vulnerabilities visible to the public. It revealed that a flaw in its network made it possible for malicious miners to manipulate gas reporting bonds and hike up the fees required for creating new markets on the platform.

“ By creating a market with themselves as designated reporter and setting a very high gas price for their own block at no cost to themselves, miners can manipulate the gas reporting bond,” security researcher Edmund Edgar who found the bug explains. “An attacker can increase the gas reporting bond required to create a market arbitrarily [and] make the gas reporting bonds too high for honest users to create markets.”

The good thing is that Augur has since patched the glitch.

Augur first launched its bug bounty program back in April, putting aside $50,000 for eligible disclosures. The company has since bumped its vulnerability prize pool to $200,000.

Edgar’s report is the first one the company has deemed “high severity,” rewarding him with $5,000 for the discovery. Until yesterday, the company had handed out only two bounties, worth $100 each.

EOS, on the other hand, has a little more experience giving out bounties. Since kicking off its security report program in May, the company has dished out over $300,000 in reward money for more than 40 disclosures.

In fact, Dutch white hat hacker Guido Vranken recently scooped more than $120,000 for bugs reported to EOS. The more concerning part is that, in the following weeks, researchers kept finding more weaknesses in the system. This is in addition to the slew of problems EOS was dealing with.

It’s worth pointing out that, while vulnerabilities are never good news, bug bounty programs are put in place to encourage hackers to disclose such bugs in a responsible manner – instead of outright exploiting vulnerable systems in order to benefit from their flaws. This is ever more crucial in blockchain networks, where recorded data is immutable by default (in most cases, that is).

Indeed, chances are there are tons of blockchain companies with faulty code out there ; but the reality is that ethical hackers have only a limited amount of time to look into all of them, hence the focus on inspecting software from companies with bug bounty programs.

Perhaps most striking is the example of Coinbase, which not so long ago gave out a $10,000 bounty to a security firm for unearthing a glitch in the platform that made it possible to reward yourself with practically infinite amounts of Ethereum .

This is precisely why every blockchain company should be running its own bug bounty program.