Substrate, Parity Technologies' Highly-anticipated Blockchain-Building Framework, has Arrived

Substrate is here

BERLIN, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Substrate 1.0 Beta is out now, opening the door to a new wave of innovation in blockchain and decentralised application development. Substrate is an open-source tech stack that makes it simple to create a blockchain customised for your application.

"Substrate takes all of our lessons learned in building Ethereum and Polkadot and distills that down into a stack of tooling that allows you to get all of those same rewards… for free," —Dr. Gavin Wood (Co-founder of Parity Technologies, Polkadot and Ethereum)

Designed for maximum freedom and ease

Substrate is architected to be as generic as possible and provide maximum technical freedom when designing your blockchain. It has a one hundred percent abstract 'execute block' function encoded in WASM that can be targeted from a number of languages, including C++ and Rust. The execute block function is hot-swappable, meaning you can upgrade your chain's logic without executing a hard fork.

Consensus is also generalised. The API provided lets you roll your own consensus system if you want, and it can handle most consensus algorithms out there. Substrate 1.0 Beta offers a combined Aura/GRANDPA consensus, with additional consensus algorithms coming subsequent releases. Down the road, consensus will be hot-swappable, meaning you can start your blockchain with one consensus mechanism and switch to another down the line – again avoiding a potential hard fork.

Substrate integrates the best in cutting-edge blockchain technology. You get a light client out-of-the-box so your blockchain can work natively on mobile devices, and pooled security and interoperability via integration with the Polkadot protocol. Substrate is authored in Rust, and there is also a JavaScript implementation for a Substrate client that runs directly in the browser.

Substrate allows you to easily configure your blockchain, but also take complete control over the code should you need to. This flexibility between ease and technical freedom is achieved through a modular design: Substrate is separated into Substrate Core and Substrate Runtime Module Library (SRML) and comes with a pre-assembled Substrate Node that is simple to configure.

Substrate Core

Substrate Core is the minimal Substrate base for building blockchains. Substrate Core gives you a foundation that is far easier than building a blockchain from scratch, though you don't get a finished blockchain. It includes: