Blockchain technology and decentralised applications have attracted tremendous attention in both academia and capital market. However, overwhelming speculations on thousands of available cryptocurrencies and numerous initial coin offering scams have also brought notorious debates on this emerging technology. This paper traces the development of blockchain systems to reveal the importance of decentralised applications (dApps) and the future value of blockchain. Blockchain systems leverage cryptography technologies, P2P networking and consensus models to provide infrastructures for decentralized applications.

The authors survey the state-of-the-art dApps and discuss the direction of blockchain development to fulfill the desirable characteristics of dApps. Readers will gain an overview of dApp research and get familiar with recent developments in the blockchain. It starts by reviewing the history of blockchain systems and clarifies their common definitions. The authors present the application scenarios of decentralised applications, which in their opinion is the subject matter of future blockchains.

The paper also explores the desirable characteristics of decentralised applications and recent directions in blockchain development, including payment channels, novel consensus models and non-public blockchains. We believe that networked computing systems are on the edge of a new era of the decentralised ecosystem, which will eventually lead to the next-generation internet services.

To discover why decentralised application could be the future of blockchain, read this research paper.