Any application has an owner who profits from their project. This conventional notion changed with the emergence of decentralized applications, or DApps. Such applications are owned by no one, cannot be deleted, or suspended. The Ethereum platform was the first to enable the creation of decentralized applications.

How Decentralized Applications Work

The decentralized Ethereum virtual machine made it possible to create applications with the following properties:

The code is stored simultaneously on all devices of the network participants and is available for review. Control over the application is accessible to members of a specific community. By majority vote, they decide the future of the project, propose possible edits, and improvements.

Any application consists of two parts:

Advantages of DApps

Such applications have the following advantages:

• no censorship — governments or law enforcement agencies cannot delete or modify the application, and corporations cannot acquire it;
• transparency — such applications do not spy on users, and open-source code allows one to know the full list of application functions;
• availability at any time — the application will continue to operate as long as there is at least one user in the network. Moreover, DApps are free from various delays and operational issues;
• user actions are rewarded with tokens. Often, hosting an application on one's computing resources generates income.

Where DApps Are Used

DApps have found widespread use and are utilized for: