What is a decentralized application or dApp?

Although DApps are recently introduced with these many usages, they have gained popularity and are in demand too. Some key features that make decentralized applications noticeable are:

Open Source
In a closed-source application, the end-users must trust the developers of the applications in terms of decentralization as they cant access their data directly via any central source. Thus, closed-source applications are always carried risks for users when it comes to adopting them. On the other hand, Dapp is a decentralized and open-source application. A DApp makes a new structure for business practices as it allows all the network participants to keep track of the happenings rather than one individual. They are made through autonomy and any changes in the DApp are decided through the consensus (the majority of users). The code-base of a DApp must be available for scrutiny.

Decentralized Consensus
Before the introduction of Bitcoin, the validity of any transaction always need some type of centralization. In order to buy it, the transaction was pushed ahead through a clearinghouse that monitored it. Decentralized applications mainly work on a peer-to-peer (P2P) model, which means that the nodes are directly connected to each other. In a DApp, a transaction is made through a consensus mechanism. When the majority of the nodes approve the transaction, it goes on and gets processed. Also, the validators of the network are stimulated by rewarding them in the form of cryptographic tokens.

No Central Point of Failure
As DApps are distributed and dont rely on one single server, there is no central point of failure. DApps allow the data that is stored in them to be decentralized across all its nodes. These nodes are independent of each other. In case of failure of one node, the other nodes wont be affected and will run on the network according to it. Different decentralized database systems like IPFS (Interplanetary File System), BitTorrent, and independent DHTs can help to create DApps with this feature.

• Diversified structure: Both these fund consist of a basket of securities bought by money that is pooled together from each investor.
• Zero downtime - Once the smart contract is deployed and on the blockchain, the network as a whole is always able to serve clients looking to interact with the contract. Malicious actors, therefore, cannot launch denial-of-service attacks targeted towards individual Dapps.
• Privacy - You dont need to give your real-world identity to deploy or interact with a Dapp.
• Resistance to censorship - No single entity on the network can block users from submitting transactions, deploying Dapps, or reading data from the blockchain.
• Complete data integrity - The data stored on the blockchain is immutable and indisputable, and all credit goes to cryptographic primitives. Malicious actors cannot forge transactions or any other data that has already been made public.
• Trustless computation/verifiable behavior - Smart contracts can be analyzed and then it is guaranteed to execute in predictable ways, without any need to trust a central authority. This is not true in the case of traditional models; for example, when we use online banking systems, we must trust that financial institutions will not misuse our personal financial data, tamper with its records, or get hacked.

• Maintenance - Dapps are hard to maintain because the code and data published to the blockchain are harder to modify. Its not easy for developers to make updates to their dapps (or the underlying data stored by a dapp) once they are deployed - even if bugs or security risks are identified in an old version.
• Performance overhead - There is a huge performance overhead, and scaling is really difficult. To achieve the level of security, integrity, transparency, and reliability that Ethereum aspires to, every node processes and stores every transaction. On top of that, proof-of-work takes a long time. A back-of-the-envelope measurement puts the overhead at something like 1,000,000x that of standard computation currently.
• Network congestion - When one dapp uses many computational resources, the entire network gets backed up. Currently, the network can only process around 10-15 transactions per second; if transactions are being sent faster than this, the pool of unconfirmed transactions can quickly balloon.
• User experience - It can be harder to engineer user-friendly experiences because the average end-user might find it too hard to set up a tool stack necessary for interacting with the blockchain in a truly secure fashion.

Though there are many dApps are used and developed, three examples of dApps include Chainlink, TraceDonate, and Minds.

• Chainlink is middleware software that gives tamper-proof inputs, outputs, and measurements for Oracle networks. Google is testing it for a BigQueryPaaS data warehouse.
• TraceDonate is a type of service that connects charities and donors to beneficiaries with the goal of building trust that donations given reach those who want it. Funds are kept in a digital wallet and enable the donor to track how the donation is spent.
• Minds is a dApp-based social media online platform that runs on open source code and can encrypt all the personal data sent by its users.

Hope you are now familiar with the decentralized application, its features, advantages, risks, and its example.
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