Substrate: The base to build the Polkadot world
Published on 3 March 2022
When traveling through the world of cryptocurrencies, many of us have come across a word that fills us with questions: Substrate
Surely we are not looking for a literal definition of Substrate, but we want to know what it means in the field of cryptocurrencies.
As a first answer we can say that Substrate is a Framework. But with that definition, not only do we still not know what Substrate is, but also many will now want to know what a Framework is.
The work environment
Let’s go by parts: in general terms, a Framework is a work environment that in software development includes a set of standardized concepts and practices to facilitate tasks. It is the base from which the developers carry out their work following the same rules. With a Framework, developers build to the same standard.
Probably, an end user who only needs to execute operations or looking to invest in certain tokens, does not need to learn about Substrate and thinks that it is a field reserved for software developers. It may be true. But it is extremely important to know what this technology is all about in order to understand the strength of new projects and be able to place them within the same family of blockchains.
“Substrate enables developers to quickly and easily build future proof blockchains optimized for any use case” says the front page of the substrate.io project.7
Substrate was designed for the correct and agile development of the Polkadot ecosystem, a multi-chain, interoperable and decentralized future, with the experience of those who were pioneers in the development of smart contracts that identified Ethereum a few years ago.
The creator
In this context, Gavin Wood is the maximum reference of the project. He is an English developer who was part of the team that founded Ethereum and was responsible for the creation of Solidity, the programming language that powered smart contracts. He also founded the Web3 Foundation to empower the new world that began to be built.
Already far from that Erhereum project, Wood has focused on the development of Polkadot, to think about the blockchains of the future.
Hand in hand with Substrate, dozens of applications began to be built since 2020, many of which are already fully operational and others in different stages of development.
This prolific activity has allowed Polkadot to grow rapidly and allow many projects to be created much more quickly and safely on the basis of substrate, instead of being developed as isolated pieces of software. Thus, speed and compatibility have allowed developers to achieve an expanding substrate ecosystem.
“Substrate makes building a blockchain far easier, faster, cheaper, and safer than ever before. As an open-source framework, developers gain free access to a wide codebase developed and used by industry-leading teams building some of the biggest networks today” also details the project on its official site.
Live projects
Within the Substrate based universe, we can find examples like Acala, a multi-chain decentralized finance platform that is already formally linked to Polkadot as a parachain.
We also find Centrifuge, a chain where you can find, among other things, the world of NFTs.
Many projects originally built for other blockchains have found in Substrate the way to quickly and safely adapt to the new Polkadot ecosystem.
Published on 3 March 2022