If you pay attention to the Polkadot project, you may see the word "substrate" many times. It is an important part of the Polkadot project, but there is very little information about it. You can't find it in the white paper or yellow book, at least there is no special introduction to "substrate". From a higher level, substrate is a framework that can create digital currency and other decentralized systems, and we have to mention an epoch-making invention, the substrate framework.
First, parity substrate is a project independent of Polkadot. Polkadot is built based on substrate. If Polkadot is a tall building, then substrate is the reinforced concrete framework of this building. Now you can use substrate to build new blockchain projects without waiting for the development progress of Polkadot.
What is substrate?
substrate is an effective solution extracted by parity team during the development of Polkadot cross chain infrastructure project. It is a blockchain system framework independent of Polkadot . It is the next generation of general blockchain technology architecture.
Substrate will provide blockchain innovators with a framework of "minimum effort for maximum freedom", because it is "highly customizable, adaptable, and made by blockchain developers who really understand blockchain developers". It allows developers to focus their work on their own business areas and provide them with all the basic capabilities such as network, consensus and security..
In the future, with more and more blockchain projects based on substrate, it will develop into a large ecological platform. Products in the ecology will no longer be limited to itself, but can share all users in the ecology and link all services, such as wallet products, browser products, DAPP, etc.
Substrate is committed to serving the innovation of blockchain, and we believe that substrate will become a powerful force to promote industry reform.
Advantages of substrate framework
1. It is more abstract, more general and has less development workload. In fact, with the help of the template provided by the framework, developers only need to pay attention to the storage, function logic and event writing needed by their own applications. Applications like cryptocat are made into application chains, which are hundreds of lines of code smaller. At the same time, using the official front-end, it can directly interact with the chain without additional programming. Being able to do this is inseparable from parity's experience in developing multiple blockchain clients.
2. The ecology of surrounding tools is relatively perfect. For example, based on the official front-end library, it is easy to develop the front-end interactive pages of the application chain. Based on the official and third-party RPC client library, it is easy to write customized RPC client.
3. Because all the runtime (application logic) is written in wasm, the application chain based on substrate can support online upgrade. That is to say, after an upgrade decision is passed by the on chain governance, even if the software is not upgraded manually, the latest version of logic will be run in the whole node. This feature makes the on Chain Governance and upgrade become seamless, and the experience is close to that in traditional software development, which basically solves the problem of governance upgrade of the above three solutions.
4. At present, the official has given the modules of wasm and EVM. If you want to develop a chain supporting smart contract, it will be very, very fast.
The epoch-making significance of substrate
When substrate appeared in 2018 with a dazzling posture, people would not only marvel at the speed of its "hair chain", but also have unlimited expectations for the future. Nowadays, with the development of Polkadot ecology, substrate seems to be moving more and more steadily. We also see some different things from it, and these things may make substrate go further.
1. One click chain opens the next stage of blockchain
2017 is a year of blockchain ecological explosion. With the gradual maturity of Ethereum technology and its recognition by more and more people, many developers realize that they can issue their own block chain projects based on Ethereum.
Usually, the project founding team first designs a blockchain application according to the combination of blockchain and an industry, owns or designs a more advanced public chain, then carries out financing based on the function of eth one click coin issuance, and distributes corresponding number of the application or token of the public chain according to the proportion of each person's financing, and then slowly burns when the fund is available Money is the exclusive chain or public chain of this application. When the chain is finished, the currency is transferred to the next chain through one-to-one mapping, which completes the development process of a chain.
However, the ideal is full, but the reality doesn't buy it. Because it is easy to issue digital assets on Ethereum, but the difficulty of building a public chain has risen several levels. To issue digital assets on Ethereum, you only need to learn the smart contract, and then a few lines of code can be made. Just because it is so convenient and fast, Ethereum is said to be one click coin issuance.
However, it is more difficult to build a public chain, especially a blockchain that needs to be reconstructed from the underlying logic. The requirements for technical personnel include understanding the code and principle of well-known blockchain, such as bitcoin and Ethereum, understanding various mainstream consensus algorithms, and understanding smart contracts. In addition, the technical team must have professionals in cryptography, distributed systems, network security, and even experts. One of the most difficult is cryptography. Some public chains are even led by the winner of the Turing Nobel Prize.
Therefore, blockchain talents are hard to find. Once upon a time, some people wanted to recruit a senior blockchain architect to be the CTO of their public chain, and no one could be recruited with an annual salary of more than one million. After all, people with this strength have done their own projects.
This is only the problem of high labor cost of the public chain. Another problem is that the R & D of public chain is difficult, and the R & D cycle is long. For a slightly more complex project, the R & D will take a year and a half, and the more difficult project will take several years. For example, the well-known filecoin project, the delay time was extended from June 2018 to October 2020, which can be seen.
In this way, it is a huge and time-consuming project to do a public chain project. However, this problem that has plagued the blockchain field for many years has been easily solved by the substrate framework. It takes only 15 minutes for one person to make a blockchain with customized functions. Substrate framework promotes the convenience of issuing currency with one button to the level of "one click chain". What seems to be understatement is to reduce the cost and R & D cycle, but it is actually an epoch-making step.
Why epoch-making? This is equivalent to that when there were only supercomputers in those years, microcomputers were suddenly born. Computers were not the exclusive property of individual institutions, but electronic devices that everyone could easily use. Thus, the birth of the Internet behind and the modern developed Internet Ecology came into being. In the same way, the substrate framework has taken an important step in simplifying the complexity of the computer revolution.
2. The application of blockchain has been rapidly matured
Before the advent of the substrate framework, for teams that want to make blockchain applications, it was equivalent to making an app in the Internet era, and they had to spend 90% of their time and money making Android systems together. Now we have substrate One click chain can be developed as easily as carrying a bag, and the main time and energy are used to improve the business level of the application itself.
However, there is another problem in the traditional blockchain application. The system will restrict the development of the application. In order to introduce new features or change the existing rules, the system will be upgraded by changing the rules of the underlying protocol. However, the system upgrade of traditional blockchain needs to be upgraded through hard bifurcation, which greatly increases the difficulty of work.
Imagine that if Apple's mobile phone system needs more than half of the people to upgrade each time, it can be regarded as a successful upgrade, which requires high fault tolerance of the system. If there is a problem in the upgrade process, it may lead to the loss of users' digital assets, and users may split into two ecosystems.
But none of this is a problem for the substrate framework. The substrate framework allows the system to be upgraded without hard bifurcation, creating a robust, secure and fast changing system, which is no worry for blockchain applications.
In addition, the substrate framework has many function modules, which makes it very easy to make a highly customized blockchain. Or, because of the needs of the project, some functions can be adjusted at will, which is very flexible and free. The emergence of substrate is just like the birth of Linux system in the Internet, which will provide an important foundation for the development of subsequent industries. With Linux, there will be Android, Huawei, Xiaomi and Samsung mobile phones. In the same way, with substrate, there will be many excellent related applications and projects in the blockchain industry in the future.
The substrate framework solves the most expensive and time-consuming construction of the main chain in blockchain application research and development, and ensures that the application running system keeps pace with the times. At the same time, the rich function module library meets various functional requirements of blockchain projects, greatly shortens the cycle from early stage to mature stage of blockchain application, and accelerates the iterative evolution speed of the project. It can be predicted that a golden age of blockchain application development is coming.
3. The ecological development of blockchain will accelerate to bloom
Before the "one click chain" of the substrate framework, a project starts to undergo the test of landing from fund-raising to the online main network. The whole process takes years, while the substrate framework can reduce this time to months, which not only speeds up the iteration time of a single project, but also means that the evolution speed of the blockchain ecology is advancing as fast as eight times.
Looking back at the blockchain projects in recent years, many projects have been launched into the main network only two or three years after the issuance of digital assets. The whole process needs to be calculated over the years. Many projects have been in decline since they were launched due to operational problems, project design problems, economic model and other issues, leading to chronic death. Some project parties are faced with high difficulty in research and development By, be unwilling to go on the main net tardy, be afraid to go online market to die prematurely.
Such a phenomenon, in fact, is bound to happen, just as the Internet began to rise at that time, the people who overturned all kinds of portal websites also flocked to go, but in the end it was a chicken feather. With the rise of mobile Internet, all kinds of o2o applications emerge in endlessly, which makes people dazzled. But what is left now? Once the achievements are made, the bones will wither, and the maturity of an industry will surely go through the barbaric growth. In the end, the waves will wash the sand, leaving behind the truly practical and valuable projects.
The same is true for the blockchain industry. For all kinds of public chain, DAPP, defi and other projects, there are more than tens of thousands of projects, but only a hundred of them have survived. With the rise and fall of the previous two years, how much capital has become the cost of new technology exploration. Nevertheless, this newly developed blue ocean, like a vortex, will still attract more and more talents and capital investment, until the real value of the blockchain is excavated.
The substrate framework, no doubt, pushes the fast forward key for the ecological development of the whole blockchain. Project iteration speeds up, more and more people and capital are involved, more and more projects die, and projects that find the real value of the blockchain will be closer and closer to us.
The sparks appear and the wires have been ignited, and the ecology of the blockchain will bloom like a bright fireworks before dawn, which is about to usher in a sunny day.
