Decentralized Applications

DApp: Decentralized Application

In the previous post, I discussed why people should move to decentralized applications. In this post, it would be better to understand what a decentralized application is and what is the backbone of all major DApps in the market.

To understand a decentralized application, you will have to understand the decentralized network. In a decentralized network, there is no single entity governing the operations of the network. All machines/nodes participating in the network are equally responsible for the state and security of the network.

In the above diagram, as you can see, nodes A, B and C are the ones keeping the network running. Those nodes are running the application and no single node can modify the behavior of the application for the connected clients. This means that even when node A stops working and its connected clients connect to node B or node C, they don't notice a difference. When we talk about decentralized network, then we implicitly mean that the control is distributed among the network nodes. This means that a decentralized network with 2 or more nodes is also a distributed network.

Now lets see how an application can run on such a network. For this to understand, we can take any example of a centralized distributed application. Lets stick to our previous example of a file storage application. Storj is a real world example of decentralized file storage application. 

 

In a file storage application, there are some basic requirements

• Uploading and downloading of a file should be feasible
• In case of a failure, file should be recoverable.

To build these requirements on a decentralized network, the files will be stored on nodes of the network where some nodes will be the primary server of the file, some will be back server of the file. Now lets see how decentralized network will solve the problems we discussed in the previous post

Data Privacy Problem

A file which is stored on a decentralized network can be broken into multiple parts and each part is encrypted with the file owner's key before its sent to the network. This provides privacy to the user's data and no one apart from the owner can view the contents of the file because only owner has the key. There is no organization, no central authority which can access the file's data.

Closed Source Problem

Because a decentralized application is run over unidentifiable computer nodes which are not controlled by a single organization, the source code of the application is made globally available so that anyone can verify the application and run it on their computer. This solves the closed source problem which no central organization can do. Anyone with access to the source code can validate whether the application has some loopholes which can lead to a data leak.

Data Encryption Problem

A decentralized application solves the encryption problem while solving the privacy problem.

When I wanted to write this article, I looked around for some real world example and I found Storj. Its a decentralized file storage application which solves all of the above problems. Now storj is not a free service but it definitely is a cheap service. Let me help you understand why storj is not a free service. As a decentralized application can be run over computer nodes of people like you and me, it needs to compensate the computer owners for lending their computer. It does so by collecting a small fee from the file owner. I also read Storj Whitepaper which describes the internal working of this application and I learnt something interesting: Erasure Codes. This is the new way to store a file keeping the replication factor to a minimum and file availability to a maximum. I might cover it in some other post

There is also a Polkadot buildathon happening in May 2021 and I have registered for it. During this event, I will be learning a whole lot about Polkadot network and will also be building my own blockchain solution. So look out for upcoming posts.