**5. Discussion and Development Guidelines**

As presented in the previous sections there are a lot of distributed ledger technologies. Most of them have emerged in the last years to address specific development issues. The ecosystem is subject to rapid changes making the selection of technologies for the implementation of decentralized applications rather difficult and fuzzy. At the same time DLTs bring benefits concerning the implementation of decentralized applications. They eliminate the need for a mediator, having the capabilities to enforce contract rules on-chain, each participant being aware of the consequences of his actions. The hashed data structures allow for easy traceability of the assets and state updates in the ledger. Since the records are public and replicated, grea<sup>t</sup> transparency is provided. Even if all the transactions and all the actions are public the platforms provide high security through consensus, public-key cryptography, and tamper-resistant recording. Nevertheless, a lot of nowadays applications and managemen<sup>t</sup> systems are rather centralized (e.g., utility grids, banking, stock exchange, etc.). Thus, efforts are committed to investigating how the DLT can be applied, integrated, and used for decentralizing such applications and systems.

In the rest of this section, we present a guideline for decentralizing systems by designing and implementing decentralized applications.
