Dapps— Everything You Need to Know
We live in an era that has great technological advances, we went from performing tasks to opening apps that take care of them for us. But now that is also beginning to change. Applications are moving from being entirely centralized to becoming decentralized; This is thanks to blockchain technology, being, in turn, the key element in the creation of cryptocurrencies.
By themselves, cryptocurrencies have changed the way of doing business worldwide and it is thanks to the fact that a few years ago interest in bitcoin and other altcoins was aroused. That is why this crypto world has had such an increase.
What are DApps?
Decentralized Applications or DApps, are applications whose operation does not depend on a central system, but on the members that make up the network, that is, they are applications based completely on open source so that no entity controls their files. In turn, the changes to be made in them must be decided under the consensus of the users, as we mentioned earlier, decentralized applications work under the DPOS protocol.
In other words, for an application to be considered a DApp, it must comply with the following requirements:
The applications must be fully programmed under an open-source code and must operate autonomously. The purpose of this is to ensure that the app data is available to any user who wants it.
They must have Delegated Proof Of Stake (DPoS) so that any changes made in the applications are preliminarily approved by the members of the same.
All data concerning the operation of the apps must be stored under a cryptographic mechanism, such as a public blockchain; which, as we know, is characterized by transparency, democracy, and security. That’s among the top reasons that this technology is being appreciated by the gambling industry and thus, the number of gambling Dapp options is increasing fast.
As the name implies, DApps must be decentralized. Decentralized applications work autonomously, so no entity manages them. It is for this reason that it is the users who, through DPOS and open source, are in charge of its operation.
How do DApps work?
Having had a good definition of what decentralized applications are, it will be easy for us to understand how they work.
The characteristics that make up DApps make them exceptional tools in the crypto world, as a result of their decentralized nature, consensus tests, open-source and blockchain registry.
Because its source code is public, it can be edited according to the contributions of each user; thanks to this the improvement of the Dapp can be guaranteed. For their part, the consensus tests provide a special incentive for producers, not only for the reward they can obtain for developing a certain action that generates tokens, but also for the improvement of the application itself, and undoubtedly, all these actions are registered under the cryptographic mechanism of blockchains, which gives it reliability and security. This accumulation of special characteristics serves as a means to have an application that works independently.
Types of DApps
Decentralized applications are classified according to their independence from blockchains. There are 3 types that we will know below:
Type I
They are the DApps that have their own blockchain; the oldest and most famous example is undoubtedly Bitcoin, but there are other altcoins that also fit in this classification, such as, for example, Litecoin, Moreno, or Dash.
Type II
They are those that use the blockchain of type I DApp, so they depend on them for their operation. But being protocols and having tokens, they can work either using their own tokens or those of the blockchain with which they work. Some examples of type II DApps are Raiden Network (which works with the Ethereum blockchain) or Omni Layer (programmed from the Bitcoin blockchain).
Type III
They use the blockchains of type II DApps, being able to use their tokens or creating their own tokens. An example of a decentralized type III application could be Safe Network, which is anchored in Omni Layer (as we mentioned earlier it is a Type II DApp) in which you can generate your own cryptocurrency Safecoin.
But if it is still not entirely clear to you how DApps are classified, with the following analogy you will surely understand how they work: Let’s suppose that type I DApps are an operating system like Windows, with which we can run DApps type II which are general-purpose software such as the Google Chrome search engine and type III DApps would be the add-ons that we can install to our browser.
It is due to the way in which the ecosystem is managed around DApps, that there are few types I, while there are many Type III.
We must take into consideration that blockchain-based DApps are still in a very young technological age. But every day we can see how their user interfaces improve, becoming friendlier and improving their business models.