7.1 Understanding DApps - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

In this section, we're gonna start building upon many of the elements we've spoken about before. So we've talked about crypto currencies, we've talked about smart contracts. We've talked about digital tokens. Now let's start combining these into some really exciting uses. And for that, we're gonna talk about what are known as DApps. Some people call them DApps. But DApps stands for Decentralized Application that we're gonna dive down into what a DApp is. First, let's go through a definition of a DApp. A DApp is an open source application that operates out autonomously on a decentralized public blockchain. It cannot be controlled by any single entity, and it generates and uses tokens. That's a mouthful. What I wanna point out to you that's interesting about the Dapps, is that DApps use smart contracts, and they use a public blockchain. Now, a Decentralized Application doesn't necessarily consist exclusively of smart contracts, it's actually an application. So it has a front end, it has a user interface, and people interact with it. But on the back end, you're actually using smart contracts to run a lot of the different business logic for that application. So let's go further into what a DApp stands for. First off, it's open source, that means that it's open source, and you can see exactly what the code uses, as opposed to closed source where a company actually secures the software, and actually has the license to be able to just protect that source code. So it's closed source. This is open source, which means that anybody can see the application and can actually use that code. Additionally, a DApp operates autonomously. What that means is that once you set it up in motion, it just runs autonomously. You do not need to be constantly making or triggering different actions for it. The whole thing operates autonomously and runs on a public blockchain. We talked about how Bitcoin is a public blockchain. Well, Ethereum is also a public blockchain. And what that means is that you can see all the transactions that happen on these Public Blockchains. Now, no single entity controls a DApp. And this is a very important element because as a result, you don't censor it, and you can't just control it. So you do not turn around and can actually just prevent someone from using your DApp, or just censor transactions on it, the whole thing. There's no single entity controlling it. Furthermore, it generates and uses tokens, we talked about digital tokens, and how you use these digital tokens. So we're gonna focus now on DApps. And I'm gonna show you some examples of Decentralized Applications. So you can see how they use these digital tokens. Let's go take a look now.