Requirements of a Decentralized Application

For an application to be considered decentralized, it must meet the following criteria. This definition was provided in the whitepaper by Johnston and others, The General Theory of Decentralized Applications, Dapps:

• The DApp should be fully open source and autonomous, and no single entity should be in control of a majority of its tokens. All changes to the application must be consensus-driven based on the feedback given by the community.
• Data and records of operations of the application must be cryptographically secured and stored on a public, decentralized blockchain to avoid any central points of failure.
• A cryptographic token must be used by the application to provide access and rewards to those who contribute value to the applications, for example, miners in Bitcoin.
• The tokens must be generated by the DApp according to a standard cryptographic algorithm. This generation of tokens acts as a proof of the value to contributors (for example, miners).