Why blockchain apps are the next big thing, and how you can get started today.
In the 2000s, web development was a lucrative skill to have; but now, websites are trivial to make. In the 2010s, knowing how to make apps could’ve turned you a pretty penny — Apple used to yell ‘There’s an app for that!’ back in the day. Now though, ‘There’s 100 apps for that!’ just doesn’t seem to have the same allure.
Artificial Intelligence was on track to be the hallmark technology of the 2020s, however the technology has not progressed as fast as imagined. While some applications such as building recommendation systems based on Machine learning have become mainstream, true artificial intelligence, for example where a computer can read a book and answer questions on it, is still largely in the research phase.
Blockchain technology, on the other hand, has progressed fast. Entrepreneurs can now build sophisticated decentralized applications in a matter of weeks to months with a blockchain development platform such as Reach, whereas this would have been much harder even 2–3 years ago.
Dapps and their usecases
A decentralized application (dApp), to put it simply, is an application or program that runs on a blockchain. Instead of backend code being hosted on a traditional server (e.g. AWS, godaddy hosting, etc), it’s hosted by a peer-to-peer decentralized network, and the code is executed by virtual machines.
The promise that dApps offer is transparency, trust, reliability and lower costs. Transparency, because it’s easy for anyone to see a record of what’s happened. Trust, because the rules (aka contracts) are known and guaranteed before hand. Reliability, because blockchains have great uptime due to their distributed nature. And lower costs, because intermediaries and/or inefficient means of transactions are reduced.
Applications recently developed on these platforms have generated multi-million to billion dollar valuations based on current or future promise (although there are a few that are purely speculative).
These dApps have the potential to transform aspects of many traditional industries that exist today, for example:
