Intro to Dapps

What are Dapps?

Decentralized applications (dApps) are applications or programs that use blockchain or peer-to-peer (P2P) network of computers as the backend. DApps (also called "dapps") are outside the purview and control of a single authority. DApps—which are often built on the protocol platforms—can be developed for a variety of purposes including gaming, finance, and social media.

It has to be noted that not all blockchains are created equal and here we are taking about chains which are fully decentralized in terms of consensus and physical network topology. Many blockchains maybe distributed in the network topology, but may have certain centralized segments, like most mobile wallets which connect via proxies to the network or centralised services to power dapps like Infura.

What are the benefits of dapps?

Dapps have several exciting aspects:

Censorship-resistant

With no single point of failure, it’s very difficult for governments, Big-tech or powerful individuals to control the network.

No downtime

Relying on a peer-to-peer system ensures the dapps continue to work even if individual computers or parts of the network go down.

Blockchain-based

As they are made of blockchain contracts, they can easily integrate cryptocurrencies into the basic functionalities of the Dapp.

Open-source

This encourages the widespread development of the dapp ecosystem enabling developers to build better dapps with more useful or interesting functions.