What are IP applications and dapps in Dappy ?
This article aims to describe two elements that are fundamentals in the Dappy ecosystem; dapps and IP applications. Dapps and IP applications can be compared to websites or web applications in legacy web. A website is a HTML document, loaded from a remote server, eventually it points to other files like images, CSS code and javascript code.
Dapps and IP applications are like websites, but they rely, to some extent, on the Dappy network, on the other side, they have fewer dependencies on centralized services that the web is currently built on.
Note: IP applications and dapps are already available the Dappy beta network.
IP application
IP applications refer to websites that use the decentralized Dappy name service instead of the Domain Name System. An IP application is finally served by a central server, just like regular websites. In order to resolve the name (ex: coolapp) to an IP address, the browser that implements the Dappy protocol does not rely on any IANA official top level domain DNS companies. The resolution operation is decentralized, and summarized by the multi-requests mechanism. The members of the Dappy network, who should be independent one with another, and participate in the same blockchain platform are co-responsible and co-authoritarian for name resolution. SSL certificates are stored on the blockchain also, the browser will not allow any client — server connection to go unencrypted.
This architecture makes it very less likely for a given website to be censored by being removed of the names registry, or to suffer from DNS hacks, where malicious agents could redirect the requests addressed to coolapp to another, illegitimate server.
According to a 2018 report made by Efficient IP, 33% of organizations suffered data theft via DNS, and the average cost of DNS attacks is $715,000. Distributing websites on Dappy instead of legacy web will make a lot of DNS related attack vectors simply disappear.
IP apps technical documentation
Dapp (Dappy)
Dapps go one step further into decentralization than IP applications.
A dapp in the Dappy ecosystem refers to a web application or website that is distributed by the Dappy network. Dapps must therefore have all or part of the assets stored on the blockchain platform the Dappy network is connected to. When a user searches cooldapp it is resolved to a blockchain address instead of an IP address, and the same network that was asked to resolve the name, will be queried to load the HTML documents and eventually the other files.
Dapps are not distributed by a unique server connected to the internet, or a centralized web hosting service (like AWS or Digital Ocean), but by a decentralized network of agents that are legally and technically independent one with another.
The availability and accuracy that can be achieved with dapps are higher than that of a centralized website because distinct legal and technical entities are co-responsible for its distribution. A typical implementation of the Dappy protocol would tolerate a small fraction of these agents to go offline or even to be hacked (= serving a fake/malicious version of the code).
Some dapps and IP applications are already distributed through the Dappy beta network. Please visit our website dappy.tech for more details, and eventually join our Discord chat group.
Raphael
