Setting up your development environment is the first step in starting with Substrate. After this, developers
Setting up your development environment is the first step in starting with Substrate. After this, developers can create a small network of validators by updating the runtime code for a node and then gradually scale it up.
When Ethereum was launched in July 2015, the world was introduced to the concept of smart contracts that hoped to revolutionize the blockchain space and allowed anyone from developers to enthusiasts to deploy decentralized applications (DApps) on the Ethereum mainnet.
With various DApps currently in use across different blockchains like Ethereum, they offer many use cases including banking, gaming, finance, online shopping and social media, with an ever-expanding user base across the globe.
Having provided the infrastructure needed for developers to create innovative digital applications, Ethereum, however, has limitations such as limited scalability and high gas fees, factors that are now inhibiting developers from building specialized solutions that can rival popular centralized platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Netflix.
To overcome these challenges and explore the possibilities of blockchain technology, Ethereum co-founder and its first chief technology officer Gavin Wood left the Ethereum Foundation and founded Parity Technologies to build blockchain infrastructure that can help create the foundation of a decentralized web, or Web3 as it is known.
Related: Five major challenges in the blockchain industry
Armed with a vast industry experience and deep understanding of creating blockchains, he went ahead to build Substrate as an open-source and future-proof blockchain framework for developers to build on, enabling them to tweak their blockchain’s architecture in line with changing customer preferences.
Substrate-based blockchains can be integrated as parachains on networks such as Polkadot or Kusama and provide a high level of interoperability, helping to bring to market truly decentralized real-world solutions that are faster, cheaper and safer than ever before.
What is substrate blockchain and how does it work?
The vision of Web3 being a decentralized blockchain-based version of the internet depends on developers being able to create different blockchain applications that can interact with each other and with networks such as Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Typically, a blockchain framework is used by blockchain developers to create such applications and by using in-built templates, they can save a lot of development time at the expense of limited customization ability.
This is where Substrate, an open source blockchain framework for building customized blockchains, is enabling developers to quickly build blockchains based on field-tested code that is powering a large ecosystem of blockchain projects across the world.
Comprising a voluminous collection of tools and libraries, Substrate is the primary blockchain software development kit (SDK) that was used to build the Polkadot layer-0 protocol and can be used by developers to create any type of blockchain.
Related: What’s the difference between blockchain layers L0 and L1?
The primary block of any blockchain is the node and relies on a decentralized network of these nodes or computers that communicate with each other to maintain the current ledger with the latest transactions. Each node in a blockchain network serves as both the client and the server, requesting and responding to requests for data as per requirements.
What makes a Substrate node unique is the way in which these operational responsibilities are divided horizontally to provide a modular framework for building blockchains. Each Substrate node makes use of two main elements: an outer node that handles network activity and a runtime that determines transaction validity and is responsible for handling changes to the blockchain’s state transition function.
The outer node is responsible for communicating with other nodes, managing the transaction pool, peer discovery and responding to remote procedure calls (RPC) or browser requests using Substrate’s RPC Application programming interface (API). By querying the Substrate runtime or by providing it with information, the outer node uses specialized runtime APIs to handle this communication.
With the Substrate runtime handling everything that happens on-chain, it is the core component of the node for building blockchains and controls how transactions are included in blocks, how blocks are returned to the outer node or how the chain state is changed in response to transactions.
Using host functions to communicate with the outer node, the Substrate runtime enables runtime validity checking and multi-platform compatibility, providing validation proofs for relay chain consensus mechanisms and offering support for fork-less upgrades to the node architecture.
How does Substrate enable you to create a custom blockchain?
Substrate offers greater freedom, flexibility and more…
cointelegraph.com