What are Dapps, and How Does DappRadar Track Them on the Blockchain?

Decentralized applications (dapps) are an exciting new trend emerging in the cryptocurrency world. They’re an important step towards a more decentralized web, and they have a wide range of interesting and promising use cases.

To find out more about dapps, we sat down with Robert Hoogendoorn, Head of Content at DappRadar, a site for ranking and learning about dapps.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what we learned about dapps, how they’re being used, and what the future holds for this technology.

Let’s start by defining what a dapp is. A dapp is an application that runs on a distributed system, like a blockchain. This gives it properties that traditional apps don’t have, like the property of not being controlled by a single entity.

There are lots of use cases for dapps. Gaming, trading, and finance are just some of the possibilities, and we’ll explore some of those in just a moment.

There are also wider and more abstract purposes for dapps. As Robert says, they represent an important step toward a more decentralized internet with more freedom for individual users, less control and censorship, and more anonymity.

Today’s internet is largely a commercial endeavor, with giant corporations like Google and Facebook dominating large sections of the web and monetizing all of our activity and data online. The decentralized web represents a step away from this, and dapps are a crucial part of that movement.

Decentralized apps are basically a contract — a piece of software written on top of a blockchain that does something with the user input and gives you something back.

Traditionally, this sort of thing happens to a server, but it can now happen directly on the blockchain. One example is gaming user interfaces that connect directly to the blockchain with no centralized server needed.

DappRadar brings dapps together into one platform and ranks them. It allows users to track the progress of dapps, analyze their performance over time, and discover new ones.

Gaming is a major part of the DappRadar listings and is becoming an increasingly important part of the crypto space as a whole.

Right now, it’s impossible to build fast-paced games like Call of Duty purely on the blockchain. However, blockchain can handle elements of that game, like badges, to show progress and verify this across platforms.

It’s also possible to trade in-game items like skins and weapons using decentralized trading platforms. And there are decentralized, blockchain-based games built purely around trading, like baseball cards.

Using DappRadar is easy. You don’t even need to sign up to access many of its features.

Some new features Robert is excited about are the new portfolio tracker, which allows users to estimate the value of all their NFTs and follow this over time. There’s also the NFT valuation tool, built to estimate the value of things like Cryptopunks (pieces of art that are created and traded on the blockchain, sometimes for huge sums of money).

The future for platforms like DappRadar looks bright, as the community grows in influence and more people begin to learn about the advantages and possibilities of decentralized apps. To learn more, check out DappRadar’s website.

And for more conversations about all things blockchain, crypto, and decentralization for people of all experience levels, tune into The Unstoppable Podcast.