What Is A Decentralized Application?

Dapps are decentralized apps. They are like normal apps, and offer similar functions, but the key difference is they are run on a peer-to-peer network, such as a blockchain.

That means no one person or entity has control of the network. There are other key features, such as:

🖧 It must be open-source and operate on its own without anyone entity controlling it.

🔍 Its data and records must be public.

🟡 It must use a cryptographic token to help keep the network secure.

While these are beliefs many in the blockchain and crypto community think should be upheld, as the industry has matured, there are dapps that use some, a combination of, or none of the above features. More on that below.

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 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 smart 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.

Dapps are decentralized apps. They are like normal apps, and offer similar functions, but the key difference is, they are run on a peer-to-peer network, such as a blockchain.

What are the weaknesses of Dapps?

While Dapps promise to remedy a lot of the key issues faced by regular apps, they do have their downside.

Hacks — As many are run on open-source smart contracts, it allows hackers the rare opportunity to probe the networks looking for weaknesses. This has led to a spate of hacks on popular Dapps.

Usability — A lot of Dapps have poor user-interfaces, which have put a lot of users off — you can read all our reviews on these services on our reviews page. But, we believe, this is something that’s improving as time goes on.

Users — Like many apps in Web 2.0, the more users a Dapp has, the more effective the network is at delivering those services. This is often referred to as the network effect. Dapps struggle from low user numbers, which can make them less interactive. It can also make them less secure, as a Dapp’s security can often rely on how many users it has.

The future of Dapps

Dapps are still in their early stages. However, there are already thousands of dapps offering up a myriad array of services: Be it playing games, exchanging money, or growing your own digital felines.

However, there’s still a long way to go. Before dapps take off, developers and the networks they build dapps on still have a lot of challenges to work out: scalability, security, and UX are among those.

The Dapp of BAMSWAP preparing to meet its users in a way that will carry all these features.