My experience with Web 3.0 applications, Dapps.

Following my Web 3.0 article I went away and found a few Web 3.0 focused applications or Dapps (Decentralised Applications). This article will explain what a Dapp is, some examples of Dapps and my experience using them.

A Dapp is an application that can operate autonomously (no central owner), typically runs using smart contracts that run on a blockchain system (like Ethereum), they provide functionality to users like a normal application but with an overall owner or controller and utilise tokens for ownership. A critical point is once the Dapp is deployed it can never be removed and anyone can use its features. This is because it’s on the blockchain, it cannot be removed and is owned by everyone and no one.

Let’s breakdown a few items from the above description.

Smart contracts

A smart contract can be thought of as the backend code, the thing that makes the application work and know what to do. A smart contract is not a legally binding contract like a smart legal contract. Smart contracts run on the blockchain and essentially are code to affect an outcome when the relevant occurrence triggers the event. An analogy often used to describe smart contracts is the vending machine. You select a product, the vending machine gives a price, you enter money, the vending machine verifies the money is appropriate and then dispenses your drink. A smart contract is like a vending machine but in code for a myriad of different uses and crucially is automatic, fraud protected and completely public (its on the blockchain which is open source).

Blockchain

I have covered this before but briefly a growing list of records, called blocks that are linked together forming a chain of every action/event that has occurred in that chain. Each chain is linked through cryptography using cryptographic hashes of the previous block in the chain and timestamps. This makes it near impossible to change a blockchains history because each block is linked to the one behind it and so on, therefore if you change one you must change every block and the cryptography. Ethereum is an example blockchain.

Decentralised

There is no owner. The code is open source and available for all to see. The storage is on a network of multiple users so in theory the application can never go down; the entire Ethereum network would have to be disabled for this to occur. Napster is an early example of a decentralised network providing a service.

Over the past week I have been using a new Dapp search engine, essentially a Web 3 version of chrome or safari. The browser allows me to have complete control over ad blocking, cookies, trackers and allows me to have complete privacy in incognito mode. The search engine is Brave and takes about 60 seconds to set up.

Brave is free and is built on the Chromium open-source code and is blockchain enabled using their Basic Attention Token (BAT) which is based on the Ethereum blockchain. The key focus of the Brave browser is to provide its users, currently over 50 million active users, the best-in-class online privacy by default. Brave blocks all ads and stops all trackers and cookies from any website. This means no longer being bombarded with popups when going to a site, no longer seeing things you searched for while shopping and then seeing the same thing pop up on the news channel you are reading. No longer having your data taken and sold to companies without your knowledge and with no reward back to you.

They don’t save your data because they never even take your data in the first place. They don’t save clicks, searches or key words, nothing. This means what you look for online while using Brave stays with you.

Braves aim is not to remove advertising but to give the user the right to choose to watch ads and not be forced to. Brave verifies publishers who can then put their ads up to be watched. If you choose to have targeted ads you get paid in BAT, Braves crytpo token.

Over the past week Brave has stopped 705 trackers and ads, saved me 18mb of data through not allowing adds and trackers to work which has then made my browser faster and saved me 35 seconds of waiting time due to these ads and trackers needing to deploy. I have trialled the ads and currently have 0 BAT’s because I don’t want to watch ads.

Is Brave an example of Web 3.0 and Dapps? Short answer is not yet, it is working towards decentralisation, main aim is on anonymity, is blockchain enabled through BAT’s and is giving the power and control back to users in the form of choosing what they want to see when it comes to ads. Recently Brave announced the integration with the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), this is the first major browser to integrate the system which allows users to access peer-to-peer file sharing and distribution, like BitTorrent.

As I spoke about in the Web 3.0 article, we are in the early stages and this new internet is being built around us, Brave is just one early example of this new world of privacy, control over your data and choice of what you want to see from advertisers. I highly recommend giving Brave a try, even if it is just to see how many adds, trackers and cookies it blocks in a single day of browsing.

About Brave | Brave Browser