Into a world that's running on decentralised applications (dApps)…

Imagine having your car working away, transporting passengers while you're at work. Imagine having your computer utilising its spare capacity to serve businesses and people across the globe. Imagine being paid for browsing the web and taking ownership of your, arguably invaluable, attention. Imagine the world like that. That world is not far away.

So, what's the big deal about dApp?

dApps are not necessarily laptop or mobile applications, as some might think.

They live on blockchains and have the following traits:

• Open Source. Ideally, they should be autonomous and all changes must be decided by a consensus algorithm, and cannot be controlled by any one entity.

• Decentralised. All data and record must be cryptographically stored in a public blockchain to avoid pitfalls of centralisation.

• Incentivised. There must be a cryptographic token that's generated and used to access the application and provide incentives to its users for maintaining the network.

These distributed, resilient, transparent and incentivised applications will reshape the technological landscape because they create value by:

• Disrupting a number of industries (e.g. retail, banking, insurance, financial exchange, marketplaces)
• Doing things that bitcoin is not capable of
• Operating exclusively with a specific network's coin/token
• Substituting an untrustworthy centralised consensus

In short, DDOS. They're the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) to current world of centralised applications.

Rule of Three

In this new world, we classify dApp into three types:

• Type I decentralised applications have their own blockchain, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Neo, Achain, Quarkchain.
• Type II decentralised applications use the blockchain of a Type I decentralised application but are "protocols and have tokens that are necessary for their function" like the Lympo, Blocksquare and Omni Protocol.
• Type III decentralised applications use the protocol of a Type II decentralised application and "are protocols and have tokens that are necessary for their function," such as the SAFE Network that uses the Omni Protocol to issue "safecoins".

If you haven't already noticed, the market valuations for Type I decentralised applications are generally much higher, followed by Type II and then Type III.

Alright! How to join the dApp party?

If you're really interested to be part of the new decentralised revolution, you can start developing your own dApp by following these steps:

• Release a white paper that describes its features, goals, mechanism for establishing consensus, and plans for tokenisation.
• Gain a following. Discuss your plan, and form a community to get feedback and make revisions.
• Have a date for when your community can contribute to token sale. Remember to do KYC for potential investors.
• Distribute the tokens.
• Start executing your idea while still developing your plans.

But as with any startup, you need to recruit your management and development team. Be honest with any technical difficulties you foresee and always state your technical requirements clearly.

Is the future anywhere near?

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” — Abraham Lincoln

As a techie and a huge advocate of blockchain in general, I'm quite excited by the research and development happening in the space. Every day, we're seeing new blockchains coming up that offer so much more, making developers move to using these newer blockchains for building their decentralised apps. We had Ethereum, Neo and Achain. Recently, we have Hero Node, QuarkChain and Squeezer's coming up.

Every day, we're one step closer to the new decentralised future — A world that's running on decentralised applications (dApps).