Substrate: The Fastest Way to build Blockchains

A Brief Overview Of The Substrate

Substrate

Today, we’ll go over the Substrate, the fastest way to build blockchains. This article will provide a brief overview of the Substrate.

So let's go ahead.

The Substrate is an open-source framework that allows teams to quickly build highly customized blockchains. The developers gain free access to a wide codebase developed and used by industry-leading teams building some of the biggest networks today. It comes with native support for connecting to Polkadot and Kusama right out of the box.

Before we dive into the Substrate, firstly we’ll need to understand the blockchain framework.

Blockchain Framework

The blockchain frameworks are software solution that simplifies the development, deployment, and support of technically complex products. In simple terms? Essentially, a blockchain framework is a huge collection of tools and libraries for building a whole, runnable, secure, feature-complete blockchain.

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.

What is Substrate?

The substrate can be described as a blockchain framework. It is an open-source framework for building customized blockchains. These blockchains can be run entirely autonomously, which means they don’t depend on any external technology to run. It enables you to build your blockchain from previously built components. i.e, enabling you 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.

Substrate For A Multichain Future

Why Use Substrate?

Here are the benefits of Substrate at a glance:

The Substrate Is Open & Customizable:

The combination of an open-source, customizable architecture, rich tooling, and a robust active community makes Substrate the most open technology for building blockchain networks.

With Substrate, you don’t need to start from zero. You can gain a tremendous head start by being able to leverage software built by Substrate’s large ecosystem of top blockchain development projects around the world — for free. Just as consumer applications don’t need to be built from scratch today, neither do blockchains anymore.

The Substrate Is The Fastest Way To Build Blockchain

You can easily have a blockchain node developed within an hour! What is more, Substrate as a blockchain framework does all the hard job for you. You do not have to worry about the core components: data layer, networking, transaction queue, and consensus. In the beginning, you can just use the default ones and start playing with your new blockchain! As you get more involved you can exchange components, but still do not have to worry about implementing them — just use a pallet that suits your needs.

Substrate Has Rich Tooling

Great tooling enables faster development, deployment, and debugging. Not only does Substrate have comprehensive, high-quality tooling, but it also enables developers to use tooling developed by others, since everything is based on the same underlying framework. This means there’s no need to reinvent the wheel with tooling.

Substrate Is Flexible

Building Substrate gives you the freedom to use custom blocks as you want or develop your own ones. You do not have to build smart contracts, but you can if you want. Instead of building smart contracts, you can create your own functions ensuring the safety of your network. Of course, in that case, it is your full responsibility to deliver proper functions. Yet, you can modify them whenever you want with the onchain upgrade mechanism. As you probably know — in Ethereum once you create smart contracts, there is no easy way back. You can’t change them, you have to deploy a new smart contract, which practically means to start from the beginning.

Substrate Is Future Proof

Substrate enables your blockchain to assimilate new technology as it comes along. You are free to choose from a long list of pallets or create your own to add the specific functionality they need. You may choose to have a pallet that enables smart contracts, or specifically not include pallets to keep their blockchain network lean and reduce attack vectors. An ever-growing number of pallets are available, created by both Parity Technologies and the community. These can be combined in many combinations to fit the needs of the desired use case. You can enhance existing pallets or create new ones.

Substrate Offers Interoperability

It offers interoperability without forgoing compatibility, security, or efficiency.

Substrate-based blockchain networks have the choice of either operating as a solo chain, a solo chain with a bridge, or integrating as a parachain. Integrating as a parachain enables independent Substrate-based blockchains to gain interoperability with the other independent blockchains. Substrate chains can inherit security from Substrate-based relay chains like Polkadot or Kusama. As a result, even a small blockchain network can gain billions of dollars in security guarantees.

Integrating with Polkadot or other blockchain networks is of course optional. Enterprises often choose to begin with a standalone network with the option of connecting to other networks as they evolve.

The introduction of off-chain features greatly reduces computation and storage costs. With Substrate, you’re not only free to choose your parameters such as gas costs, governance, and consensus, but you’re also free to choose how your blockchain is deployed and if/how it should communicate with other networks.

Getting Started With The Substrate To Become A Blockchain Developer

The substrate is written in Rust. Rust is quite similar to JavaScript in how you write the code but its logic might be compared to C++. Therefore even if you only know JS, you will easily move to Rust.

Besides, if you want to be a blockchain developer knowing Rust is one thing, the other one is understanding the idea behind blockchain.

The first step is to set up the development environment and build a single blockchain node on your local computer.

To keep things simple, you’ll connect to the local node using a web browser and look up a balance for a predefined sample account.

Before You Begin

• You have an internet connection and access to an interactive shell terminal on your local computer.
• You have the Rust compiler and toolchain installed.
• You can check whether you have Rust installed by running the rustup show command. If Rust is installed, this command displays version information for the toolchain and compiler.

Build The Node Template

Clone the node template repository using the polkadot-v0.9.26 tag by running the following command:

git clone --branch polkadot-v0.9.26 --depth 1 https://github.com/substrate-developer-hub/substrate-node-template

Change to the root of the cloned directory:

cd substrate-node-template

Compile the node template:

cargo build --package node-template --release

Because of the number of packages involved, compiling the node can take several minutes.

Start The Node

Verify that your node is ready to use and see information about the command-line options available by running the following command:

./target/release/node-template --help

The usage information displays the command-line options you can use to:

• Start the node
• Work with accounts
• Modify node operations

View account information for the predefined Alice development account by running the following command:

./target/release/node-template key inspect //Alice

The command displays the following account information:

Secret Key URI `//Alice` is account:
Network ID:    substrate 
Secret seed:       0xe5be9a5092b81bca64be81d212e7f2f9eba183bb7a90954f7b76361f6edb5c0a
Public key (hex):  0xd43593c715fdd31c61141abd04a99fd6822c8558854ccde39a5684e7a56da27d
Account ID:        0xd43593c715fdd31c61141abd04a99fd6822c8558854ccde39a5684e7a56da27d
Public key (SS58): 5GrwvaEF5zXb26Fz9rcQpDWS57CtERHpNehXCPcNoHGKutQY
SS58 Address:      5GrwvaEF5zXb26Fz9rcQpDWS57CtERHpNehXCPcNoHGKutQY

Start the node in development mode by running the following command:

./target/release/node-template --dev

In development mode, the chain doesn’t require any peer computers to finalize blocks. As the node starts, the terminal displays output about the operations performed. If you see messages that blocks are being proposed and finalized, you have a running node.

... Idle (0 peers), best: #3 (0xcc78…5cb1), finalized #1 ...
... Starting consensus session on top of parent ...
... Prepared block for proposing at 4 (0 ms) ...

Connect To The Node

Create a simple HTML file with JavaScript and the Polkadot-JS API to interact with the blockchain.

For example, create an index.html the file that uses JavaScript and HTML to:

• take an account address as input
• look up the account balance using an onClick event
• display the balance for the account as output

This sample index.html provides a simple example of how to use JavaScript, the Polkadot-JS API, and HTML to get an account balance.

Copy and paste the index.html sample code into a new file in your text editor and save the file on your local computer.

Open the index.html file in a web browser.

Copy and paste the SS58 Address for the Alice account in the input field, then click Get Balance.

Stop The Node

1. Go to the terminal that displays blockchain operations.
2. Stop the local blockchain and clear all states by pressing ctrl-c.

Now you have successfully learned how to compile and run a single blockchain node on your local computer.

Wrap Up

We have seen a brief overview of the blockchain framework’s Substrate. We have discussed how to get started with this, why we use it, and how it is the fastest way to build blockchains. Continue reading to learn more about using Substrate → https://blog.cryptostars.is/substrate-build-your-1st-blockchain-9121757fa5a7. Follow me on Linkedin to stay connected → https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishanshahzad/