Through the self-developed lightweight WASM smart contract language Subscript, TrustBase has captured the developer’s “key minority” in the development of the blockchain ecosystem, providing a way for any developer to realize the vision of Polkadot and Web 3.0 Easy to use weapon.
Written by: a poplar tree
According to PolkaProject statistics, as of January 31, the number of projects established in the Polka Ecosystem has reached 354, covering DeFi, privacy, games, wallets and many other fields, and the expansion rate of the projects is still increasing.
Among them, nearly 1/3 of the projects (114) are based on the Parachain developed by the Polkadot blockchain framework Substrate. As the open source development framework provided by Polkadot for global blockchain developers, the Substrate framework is undoubtedly the biggest contributor to the formation of the Polkadot ecology.
Traversing the blockchain world before the advent of Polkadot, there has never been a public chain or project that can quickly unite other projects together like Polkadot, and this is just the beginning.
Substrate: A powerful tool to realize Web 3.0
When Gavin Wood showed the world to develop a blockchain in 15 minutes at the 2018 Web 3 Summit, people realized that a whole new era had been opened.
Before the advent of Substrate, people were doing repetitive things on each blockchain, such as p2p networks, consensus protocols, Merkle trees… these complicated basic low-level design work consumed a lot of energy for developers. The unbearable weight of blockchain developers.
The Substrate framework modularly encapsulates the basic low-level design of the blockchain. Developers only need “one-click call”, which saves the original tedious workload, can greatly improve the efficiency of developers, and pay more attention Focus on the development of business logic.
More than that, as the author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper, Gavin Wood also put the things that Ethereum did not complete into the Substrate framework. As a highly customizable and adaptable blockchain development framework, Substrate has been given unprecedented features:
- Scalability. An isolated blockchain can only handle limited traffic, while the blockchain based on Substrate allows transactions to be processed efficiently and in parallel through a parallel chain mechanism;
- specialization. The Substrate framework can build blocks based on specific use cases or applications to create highly customized blockchains.
- Interoperability. Different blockchains based on the Substrate framework can share information and functions to achieve interoperability and compatibility between chains;
- No fork upgrade. The Runtime section of the Substrate framework allows the blockchain to be upgraded without time-consuming and splitting; new functions can be added without the need to completely transform the network.
- autonomy. The community can manage its network according to its own wishes and has transparent rights and interests in the governance of the entire Polkadot network in the future. The team can customize and optimize its blockchain governance according to its own needs, experiment with new ideas, or deploy pre-built modules faster;
With the help of the Substrate framework, Gavin Wood opened the era of “one-click chain”, making Polkadot a “blockchain platform platform”. From this perspective, the positioning of the Substrate framework is similar to Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard-from Ethereum’s “one-click coin issuance” to Polkadot’s “one-click chain issuance”.
From then on, through “one-click chain” and parachain slot auctions, any developer can create a Polkadot parachain, customize it according to specific use cases or applications, and share the information and functions of Polkadot’s global ecosystem. This is an unprecedented innovation in the history of blockchain development.
Because of this, many developers were quickly followed by Substrate after they came into contact with Substrate, and more and more teams began to actively build a series of applications, and there are currently nearly 1/3 (114) of Polkadot parachains. All projects adopt the Substrate framework, which not only establishes Substrate’s status as the best blockchain building tool, but also shows that the Pokadot chain ecology based on it has strong vitality in the long run:
Compatible with support for TEE, hardware trusted modules, and privacy modules, it is convenient for other blockchain engineers to use, develop and re-develop. It is destined that its future development volume will be unprecedentedly huge, and even hope to combine artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things , Cloud computing and other fields of real value, to achieve the integration and landing of blockchain and the real economy and society.
Hurricanes often originate from Weiping. Polka’s current achievements in the PolkaProject trial are just the beginning of building his own blockchain empire brick by brick. It also proves that the Web3.0 that Gavin Wood calls is making great strides towards us. Come.
And in this journey, Substrate is the unreliable tool that can help developers move forward.
ink! : The threshold and quagmire of language, developers are the “critical minority”
But, how many people can pick up this “sharp tool”?
According to statistics from the Polkadot community, in January 2021, Polkadot’s monthly developer number was 356. In the same period, the number of developers in Ethereum was about 2,200. The number of developers in EOS was 109, compared with last year. Of 162 people dropped by 31.48%.
If we zoom in further, we will find that there are actually very few developers in the entire blockchain world. This “critical minority” has greatly restricted the rapid development of the industry to some extent:
According to the “2019-2020CSDN China Developer Report”, 31% of traditional developers are optimistic about the combination of big data and blockchain, 28% are optimistic about the combination of IoT and blockchain, and 13% are optimistic about the combination of artificial intelligence and blockchain. Combine and so on.
However, among these programmers who are proficient in big data, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence development, more than 76% of developers do not understand or only understand some concepts, and cannot participate in the development of the blockchain field.
Especially compared to the grand vision of Web3.0, the number of developers struggling for this is not as small as that of Web2.0. Therefore, seizing the “critical minority” of developers and expanding the developer camp is not only an urgent matter to strengthen the early ecology. , Is also the core of the follow-up long-term competition.
Similarly, Polkadot wants to realize the vision of Web3.0 and eventually become part of the Web3 network. It also needs to conduct long-term and large-scale drainage of the developer community, so that more traditional developers can directly use this weapon. In fact, this is not an easy task-everything in Substrate uses Rust-based ink! Language.
Compared with traditional languages such as Java and C/C++, the difficulty curve of the Rust language is steep, and the learning threshold is higher; and the ink! smart contract currently lacks tools to support the development of DApps, and is basically not easy to use and safe to use. Existing EVM-based applications are migrated to WASM-based Substrate blockchain tools or applications, which are not easy to integrate with Dapp.
Simple language has a higher upper limit, and high threshold ink! Obviously not in this list. Based on ink! Substrate is not friendly to traditional developers. It not only puts Polkadot in the quagmire of competing with Ethereum for the stock of developers, it also didn’t help Polkadot actively compete for the development of the blockchain world from the heavily-class Web2.0 social group. This problem greatly limits the development of Polkadot’s developer ecology and becomes the biggest stumbling block to the realization of the Web3.0 vision.
In the country with the most traditional developers (China), the author collected developer data from the CSDN forum. Java is the most commonly used development language for developers, while Blockchain languages such as Solidity and Rust all account for less than 1%, which shows the follow-up The development and growth of the blockchain world requires a more open ecology, especially the participation of more traditional developers.
The most commonly used language by developers in 2019-2020 (the survey is multiple choices)
Gavin Wood once wrote in “Why Do We Need Web3.0”, “Web 3.0 is a set of inclusive protocols, building blocks for application developers. A new way of programming.”
If this peer-to-peer, serverless, and no information flow management authority represents the future, it must have the ability to accommodate all the underlying languages in the world to work in it, and allow all developers to empower themselves without access.
TrustBase: Break the barriers of developers and be the extraditioner of Polkadot and Web3
In order to solve this pain point, it is foolish to overthrow and rebuild the Rust-based Substrate framework. The launch of TrustBase based on the Substrate framework proposes a new solution based on this consideration:
TrustBase independently developed the lightweight WASM smart contract language Subscript to help traditional Web developers and Java engineers participate in the construction of the Polkadot ecosystem without barriers to meet the needs of traditional developers to break through industry barriers and develop blockchain development.
The lightweight WASM smart contract language Subscript language follows the Typescript grammar, and completes the encapsulation of the Substrate smart contract in Assemblyscript, which can efficiently interoperate with JavaScript, not only realizes the integration with Dapp, but also supports any developer to quickly deploy Web3 .0 The capabilities of the network components.
And as soon as it debuted, the audience was astonished. In June 2020, in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, Germany, the Symon Ho team showed people how to drag and drop the various modules of the Substrate framework with Subscript. Deploying Polkadot’s native smart contract is as simple as “a traditional Java programmer’s daily work”.
“Since Subscript is designed for Wasm from API to syntax, it uses strict typing and language checking as a whole, which makes its learning curve very flat. Our goal is to make a Java engineer feel like seeing an old friend when he sees Subscript. .”
Because of this, more and more smart contract developers have begun to show strong interest in TrustBase and its Subscript language. TrustBase is also considered by the industry to solve the problem of “helping traditional developers lower the threshold and participate in the Polkadot ecology without barriers.” The core of the problem, its ecological development is also in full swing:
- In April 2020, the TrustBase team independently developed a new underlying programming language Subscript, which was tested for half a year to achieve compatibility with the WASM virtual machine;
- In September 2020, TrustBase was selected by the Web3 Foundation Grant plan, and its product Subscript officially became an official support project of the Grant plan;
- In November 2020, TrustBase began to implement early market plans;
- In January 2021, TrustBase CC1 test network goes online;
- On February 2, 2022, TrustBase delivered the core library functions of the Subscript language to the Web3 Foundation, and will receive the second grant as planned.
It is committed to helping more developers participate in the construction of Polkadot by providing more lightweight underlying development tools, enabling one-click deployment of applications, and forming a powerful ecology of Polkadot-parachain-smart contracts.
Looking back at the actions of the Symon Ho team, the author does not think that TrustBase can be simply regarded as Polkadot’s smart contract platform, because Subscript is empowering traditional developers to support the development of any Web3.0 network components: customized underlying programming based on Subscript Tools, digital assets, smart contracts, DeFi, oracles, which also benefit from its own original features:
- Static syntax checking. Different from TypeScript, which is aimed at dynamic type operating environment, Subscript has strict static syntax checking when compiling, which avoids the dynamic feature of not being able to compile TypeScript effectively in advance;
- Multiple access support. When the smart contract interacts with the environment outside the sandbox, the parameters that can be passed are limited to basic integer types. Subscript provides a complete syntax that can be used to define external interface types. Subscript also comes with instruction functions that can access the underlying wasm, providing integer operations, virtual machine stack access, memory loading and other operations.
- Rich library functions. Subscript adds ERC20 compatible, ERC721 compatible contracts, authority control contracts, proxy contracts, governance contracts, multi-signature contracts and other common contract library functions to the extended library, and extends the support for string, address, hash and other data types.
- IDE development environment. Subscript uses Subscript workbench to provide developers with a browser-based smart contract integrated development environment (IDE). The workbench is similar to the Ethereum development environment Remix, and comes with the compilation tools required for the development of wasm smart contracts. DApp developers can synchronize the code in github in Subscript workbench, create smart contract projects, compile wasm, and publish to the test network. After the development of the smart contract virtual machine is completed, Subscript workbench can also provide online debugging functions for smart contracts similar to Remix. Developers can choose to add breakpoints to the browser source code to debug the compiled wasm code in a single step;
It can be seen that the underlying programming tools based on Subscript have far-reaching significance to Polkadot. With the expansion of Polkadot’s ecology, the entire Polkadot structure will generate many requirements and needs for the underlying tools, and the Subscript language with the above technical characteristics realizes the backward compatibility with Polkadot, enabling customized underlying programming based on Subscript The tool will serve the entire Polkadot ecology and solid the foundation of Web3.0.
In terms of smart contract applications, the Subscript language realizes compatibility with the WASM virtual machine based on the Polkadot Substrate framework. Different from Solidity’s EVM compatibility, the use of Subscript language to develop Polkadot smart contracts will not produce historical baggage similar to the Ethereum smart contract platform.
“Imagine a traditional developer who doesn’t understand consensus algorithms, Merkle trees and other technical problems, but can quickly deploy a smart contract that is even better than Ethereum. This is exactly what TrustBase does.” Based on the intelligence developed by TrustBase Contracts and DeFi applications will have no historical burden of EVM compatibility, no unreasonable transaction fees (Gas), no DeFi contract security vulnerabilities caused by the flexibility of Solidity smart contracts, and share the global cross-chain interoperability with the Polkadot ecosystem Even cross-chain interoperability with Bitcoin and Ethereum public chains.
In summary, TrustBase roughly has the following characteristics:
- Low technical participation threshold
- Support the development of Web3 network components
- Smart contract applications are simpler and more reliable
- Wasm high execution speed
- Meet diversified customized models
- Sharing cross-chain and good interoperability
- No fork upgrade
- Low deployment cost
- Gas cost is low
Developers are always the lifeline of a public chain. If Polkadot has broken the “information island” between public chains, and the Substrate framework has become a weapon of Web3.0, then TrustBase tries to make it available to all developers.
TrustBase parachain can do many things through the Subscript language: underlying programming tools, digital asset issuance, native smart contract deployment, Dapp, DeFi, Dex, etc. Thanks to the support of Subscript development tools, TrustBase’s future ecology will be very rich.
Therefore, it is building influence in the global developer community. In China, according to the official statistics of the Subscript technology community, TrustBase cooperates with Jinse Hackthon and Huobi Polka Ecological Fund to organize the “Polkadot Developer Training Camp” More than 260 people have registered and registered, and nearly 100 people continue to study, and this is only the data of the first course.
Just like Gavin Wood’s amazing “one-click hair chain” at the time, Polkado has the charm and possibility that no other competitor currently can match in the face of the vision of the Web 3.0 era. It has become a “zone that continues to grow and develop a larger world by itself Blockchain Garden of Eden”.
And through the Subscript language, the TrustBase team has made it possible for anyone to use Substrate to open up the world of Web3.0, and go to the other side of Web3 with Polkadot, almost playing the role of “Poca’s extradition” Character.
