ViaWallet Introduction | What Is a DApp? What Makes It Promising?

The word App must be familiar to everyone. With the advent of the smartphone era, our lives are flooded with various Apps, such as WeChat, QQ, and Alipay, the three most important in China. The normal operation of the App relies on the storage and management of a large amount of data by the project team backstage, or in other words, Apps are built on a centralized server. On the contrary, a DApp is a decentralized application.

Many people have a misunderstanding that DApp is exclusive to the blockchain. Broadly speaking, any decentralized application is a DApp, yet most DApps are built on the blockchain due to their decentralized nature.

We know that all applications run on the operating system (OS) instead of on the bare device. Without the iOS or Android systems on the mobile phone, the app becomes useless. Similarly, DApps are derived from the underlying blockchain development platform which is akin to iOS and Android on mobile phones. As blockchain technology becomes mature, DApp is also drawing increasing attention.

At the end of 2017, CryptoKitties alone started an era of blockchain games, bringing DApp to the spotlight for the first time. The hit game even quadrupled the pending transactions on Ethereum in a short time, leaving the Ethereum network in serious congestion. That’s when the general public became interested in DApps.

In 2018, Fomo3D introduced an all-pay auction to the Ethereum network. Its simple and clear gameplay and huge potential profits made it an overnight hit and also gave rise to countless copycats.

Most of those popular DApps in the early days were games and gambling applications. Despite accumulating a massive user base within a short time, they availed themselves of loopholes in the policy, and thus are short-lived under regulation.

The second half of 2020 witnessed the DeFi boom evidenced by the quick rise of DeFi DApps. Innovations such as decentralized transactions, yield farming, and unsecured lending have sent many excellent financial DApps such as Uniswap and Sushi to huge success.

Financial DApps cleverly combine financial derivatives with the features of the blockchain, so that they can attract users through short-term high returns and also serve users in the long run. They are no longer a flash in the pan.

With the advancement of blockchain technology and innovative gameplay, DApps will surely play an increasingly important role in the blockchain world, and knowledge of DApp use will be a must for all beginners in this field.