We already know that Substrate allows blockchain builders to easily design and deploy blockchains, but how can decentralized application developers start deploying their applications on Polkadot without building the entire blockchain?
Enter Moonbeam, which is a smart contract chain based on Substrate, which plans to become a parachain on Polkadot, providing smart contract developers with a familiar experience to deploy their applications to the rapidly growing Polkadot ecosystem. Moonbeam enables developers familiar with the Ethereum smart contract toolkit to easily take advantage of the network effect and quickly gain attention on the Polkadot network. Applications built on Moonbeam benefit from interoperability within the Polkadot ecosystem and interoperability with Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Ethereum compatibility and more features
For various reasons, many developers and teams have shifted their attention from platforms focusing on a single blockchain to having multi-chain solutions. Some projects have scalability concerns, that is, the Ethereum base mainnet has become too expensive to deploy and use its applications on it. Other projects worry about the development direction of the Ethereum 1.0 chain, because the focus of Ethereum has shifted to Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity) and they do not want to wait for the implementation of these new features. Some projects also realize that they need more direct community agents to manage necessary upgrades and potential repairs in the long run.
Projects with these concerns do not want to give up all the hard work they have put in to develop applications on Ethereum, but need a way to solve their problems, which is why Moonbeam provides a new kind of decentralized application developers Way to get scalable and manageable applications.
With Moonbeam, developers can easily port their existing application code to deploy it on the Moonbeam platform, which is cheaper and directly manageable. This means that smart contracts written in Solidity are directly compatible with Moonbeam’s EVM. Developers can also benefit from the existing Ethereum tool ecosystem, such as Truffle and Web3 RPC. Developers who deploy Dapps on Moonbeam can even use the successful Metamask browser extension.
We have already seen the success of “wrapped bitcoin” on Ethereum. The decentralized transfer bridge between Polkadot and Bitcoin allows the Moonbeam community to take advantage of more liquidity, so that more holders can put their Bitcoin into use.
Substrate’s pallets provide DeFi and smart contract primitives
Substrate, the next-generation blockchain framework, supports a variety of modules, which developers can easily integrate into their blockchains, including the Ethereum Virtual Machine pallet that Moonbeam is using. The Moonbeam community can also use other pallets to help implement more functions of the smart contract blockchain, such as on-chain governance modules, social recovery of lost accounts, and access to financing opportunities through the on-chain treasury.
The interoperable Polkadot ecosystem will surpass Substrate’s own pallet, enabling Dapps on Moonbeam to use other parachain decentralized financial (DeFi) tools, such as Acala’s aUSD stable currency, Chainlink’s oracle, and Polkaswap’s DEX.
Web3 Foundation Grant Winner
The Moonbeam team also received a grant from the Web3 Foundation to build a Web3-compatible RPC library. Through RPC implementation, developers can run Ethereum native tools, such as Truffle, Remix and MetaMask, on the Moonbeam network based on Substrate.
Read the documentation to learn more about Moonbeam:
