From General-Purpose Blockchains to Decentralized Applications (DApps)

Ethereum started as a way to make a general-purpose blockchain that could be programmed for a variety of uses. But very quickly, Ethereum’s vision expanded to become a platform for programming DApps. DApps represent a broader perspective than smart contracts. A DApp is, at the very least, a smart contract and a web user interface. More broadly, a DApp is a web application that is built on top of open, decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure services.

A DApp is composed of at least:

  • Smart contracts on a blockchain

  • A web frontend user interface

In addition, many DApps include other decentralized components, such as:

  • A decentralized (P2P) storage protocol and platform

  • A decentralized (P2P) messaging protocol and platform

Tip

You may see DApps spelled as ÐApps. The Ð character is the Latin character called “ETH,” alluding to Ethereum. To display this character, use the Unicode codepoint 0xD0, or if necessary the HTML character entity eth (or decimal entity #208).