Are Dapps the Best of Blockchain?Since the birth of the internet, centralized entities have continued to dominate users’ data, and while this has been in good faith, personal data has been prone to mass surveillance by governing bodies, at risk of loss as services shut down, and with no security guarantees. Additionally, increased popularity of services or platforms demands a direct proportional increase in resources, calling the need to assess the usability of the available disk space and bandwidth, against the huge amount of data generated by users on a daily basis.
What does blockchain offer?
This is the underlying technology behind Bitcoin, which was initially published by a person or group of persons in the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and officially launched in 2009, before being advanced in terms of innovations and applications by Ethereum in 2015. Using a decentralized and distributed fashion, blockchain allows individuals and organizations to exchange value in a quick and secure manner. This technology is continuously being used to maintain data records across industries, and because of the safety measures of its ledger system, malicious elements within the system cannot change or tamper with the records, no wonder blockchain technology has been embraced for both financial and non-financial transactions. Most fundamentally, the blockchain technology is at the very core of developing decentralized systems.
Decentralized Applications, the Better OptionThrough Ethereum, blockchain technology gave birth to self-executing smart contracts, where government services and businesses of a centralized nature are fast being replaced — allowing users to connect with providers more directly. Already, the number of decentralized applications (dapps) is on the rise, with many others currently at various stages of completion. Some disruptive dapps so far include:
FirstBlood.io, Alice.Si, Gnosis, Coakt, PatroIX, SlackCoin, BitNation, EthLance, SwarmCity, and Sustainy. Others include Storj, Golem, Augur, ETH Tweet, WeiFund, 4G-Capital, KYC-Chain, and Venue Project.While blockchain technology was initially limited to the finance industry, the evolution of these dapps has seen the technology penetrate other industries like healthcare, marketing, insurance, government, media, voting, and real estate.
Generally, these Ethereum-based applications are broadly divided in to three categories:
Financial applications provide users with incredible managerial and contractual means of using their money, while
semi-financial applications involve both monetary and non-monetary usages. The last general category, governance applications, is those applications that have nothing at all to do with financial management, a good example of which is voting.
For applications to qualify as dApps, they are required to be completely open-source, in the sense that their operations are autonomous, and consensus of all its users remain a compulsory requirement for the execution of any changes. To ensure that there are no central points of failure, such applications must store all data and records cryptographically — that is to say that no one can shut down dApps because they are not at the mercies of servers, but rather independent nodes, ur, where others can continue running on the network in case one fails. In this regard, cryptographic tokens (Bitcoin or otherwise) are required in order to access dapps and reward miners/users for their valuable contribution.
The
development process of dApps includes publication of a whitepaper and prototype, where the idea and the features of are described. This is usually followed by setting up initial sale of tokens, and then by what is now famously known as ICOs (Initial Coin Offering), the third stage where the ownership stake is spread to early buyers. Before the dApp is finally deployed, it goes through the fourth stage of implementation and launch, which is made possible by the funds raised in the second and third stages.