CHAPTER 5

Ethereum, Smart Contract, and dApps

Introduction

Ethereum is a decentralized, self-contained economy for transactional

computation and related data. To be built and run without any downtime,

fraud, control, or interference from a third party is the largest, well-

established, and open-ended decentralized software platform that enables

the deployment of smart contracts and dApps.

Built by several people around the world, it is an open-source proj ect

allowing us to build and use decentralized applications and execute them on

blockchain technology. It is not controlled or owned by anyone like Bitcoin

is. It was designed to be adaptable and flexible.

The facilitation of money for exchange, document content, property

ownership rights, stocks/ shares, or anything of value enabled by the

computer code is called a smart contract. They are decentralized

agreements solving the issue of trust in the digital world.

An application in which the “server side” script is a well-known smart

contract existing on the Ethereum network is a dApp (distributed

application), which is accompanied by a user-friendly front-end. dApps are

more robust and flexible, which means that enterprises can ensure minimal

interruptions and downtime for business continuity and resilience because

they do not require connectivity to a single centralized server to run.

After reading this chapter, you will have gained a good understanding of the

main components of the Ethereum platform and its wider ecosystem,

enabling you to design, implement, and deploy Ethereum dApps with a

smart contract.

As a pre-requisite, programming experience in any language is helpful; no

prior blockchain/ Ethereum specific knowledge is required, a local Web

server is needed for the dApp part.