From App to DApp

Over the past several sections, we have gradually built a decentralized application. We started with a pair of smart contracts to run an auction for ERC721 deeds. These contracts were designed to have no governing or privileged accounts, so that their operation is truly decentralized. We added a frontend, implemented in JavaScript, that offers a convenient and user-friendly interface to our DApp. The auction DApp uses the decentralized storage system Swarm to store application resources such as images. The DApp also uses the decentralized communications protocol Whisper to offer an encrypted chat room for each auction, without any central servers.

We uploaded the entire frontend to Swarm, so that our DApp doesn’t rely on any web servers to serve the files. Finally, we allocated a name for our DApp using ENS, connecting it to the Swarm hash of the frontend, so that users can access it with a simple and easy-to-remember human-readable name.

With each of these steps, we increased the decentralization of our application. The final result is a DApp that has no central point of authority, no central point of failure, and expresses the “web3” vision.

Auction DApp architecture shows the complete architecture of the Auction DApp.

Figure 14. Auction DApp architecture