Let us chat about decentralized apps that are all the rage these days.
A dApp is basically any application/platform that is built on the Blockchain, usually involving Smart Contracts. This, in theory means it is almost impossible to cheat or screw with. That would involve undermining the entire Blockchain – impossible with any processing power currently available.
I happen to have stuff to say about dApps, as someone who is currently overseeing the development of a few and helped with auditing/conceptualizing/marketing a few others.
For one, they are indeed awesome and revolutionary things that can disrupt a bunch of industries by decentralizing trust and bringing in impartial and transparent arbitrage.
Also, any of them is probably fair (or baloney) if you just take a glance at the Smart Contract in question and see if someone snuck in some nefarious thing. Like if you are playing chess and the developer added a Godzilla piece that goes anywhere it wants and destroys all the other pieces, you can see it right there in the code, breathing fire and all that.
Okay, maybe not so graphically but you catch my drift.
These things are awesome with but one problem:
Hell knows which of the current development platforms is gonna be the industry standard.
Ethereum is the most prominent one, but there are others like EOS (that recently got into a lot of trouble with their network), Cordana, NEO, TRON, Neblio, etc, etc – a bunch of stuff in the works.
So we are in this weird spot where there are maybe like three developers in the space as it is.
And they are pulled between these different platforms that use different programming languages and are not highly compatible. The funny part? Everybody has an opinion about which one of them is going to beat them all and take its rightful place as industry standard.
My take on this? The number of real users on each of these platforms, by which I mean actual people who engage with the Blockchain and not just hold coins/tokens or trade them on the exchanges, it’s minuscule. Comparatively few people ever actually got goods/services through these apps.
All these guys who are there already, though? They’re pioneers and explorers. Tap into this.
Experiment. Go around these communities, absorb the documentation, play around in the sandbox. Do all this stuff and engage your audience to do the testing and debugging with you and for you. Reward them for it, make learning this stuff into a game. A lot of folks will love this stuff.
dApps introduce this interesting concept of open, collaborative development that didn’t really exist before due to how the internet was (and is) structured. I’m telling you, the first platform to figure out how to tap into this and make creating easy and fun for the laypeople? It’s gonna be the one ring to rule them all. And no, I won’t take another potshot at EOS performance here, even though I really want to.
If you have some interesting ideas of your own, I am open to hearing them.