What is Decentralized Application (dApp)?

A decentralized application — or dApp — makes use of blockchain technology to address use cases ranging from investment to lending to gaming and governance. Although dApps may appear similar to web applications in terms of user experience (UX), dApp back-end processes eschew centralized servers to transact in a distributed and peer-to-peer fashion. Rather than using the central Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to communicate, dApps rely on wallet software to interact with automated smart contracts on supported blockchain networks.