Topics ｜ How did developers first notice Substrate?
Today’s article comes from a curiosity, that is, “How did developers first notice Substrate?” So we asked a few developers about this question (although we usually went off topic a lot at the end).
Some of them are developing Substrate-based projects; some are actively learning and promoting Substrate technology; others have glanced at Substrate in the crowd and then turned to other technical frameworks …
We feel there might be some commonalities for developers from knowing about Substrate to actually choosing (or not choosing) it, so the content of the conversation is also shared here for your reference. “PW” in the following text stands for PolkaWorld.
Jiyang Liu — Rebase Community Leader, Substrate Developer
PW: How did you first notice Substrate?
Jiyang Liu: I can’t remember… But it’s hard not to know about Substrate. I started to think that since it’s Gavin’s work, it probably wouldn’t be bad.
PW: So you later joined the Substrate Development Class of Teacher Xiliang（CTO of Laminar）?
Jiyang Liu: I saw that many projects used Rust at the time, and I wanted to find a chance to learn it anyway. Then I just found this course that I could just learn Rust and Substrate at the same time.
PW: Which one do you think is better？CITA or Substrate？
Jiyang Liu: This may depend on the usage scenario. It’s not easy to say who is better, and I don’t think I have the knowledge to judge that for now.
I think the biggest difference is the scene of the alliance chain.
Everyone thinks Substrate is a public chain facility, but in fact it can be an alliance chain. Substrate is relatively modular and can be used in many places. You can change it in your way if you want to do some paticular feature.
CITA is facing the alliance chain, so there will be more optimizations in this regard. So in terms of the direction of the alliance chain, Substrate is definitely not as feature-rich as CITA.
PW: What features specifically?
Jiyang Liu: The alliance chain needs a management mechanism for alliance members. The scenario of the alliance chain is also different from the public chain. The nodes among the alliance chains are credible. In fact Substrate should also be able to do what CITA can do.
PW: So the positioning of Substrate is convenient for you to make a chain, and CITA is convenient for you to make an alliance chain?
Jiyang Liu: Well, Substrate and CITA are like WeChat and Enterprise WeChat. Some people also use WeChat also to discuss work, but its corporate functions are certainly not as powerful as corporate WeChat. This example is quite inappropriate, but easy to understand.
Lurpis — Founder of Bifrost
PW: How did you first notice Substrate?
Lurpis: We were looking for cross-chain technology solutions at that time, because our business was limited by smart contract, there was no way to copy it to multiple chains, or the cost of copying was too high. Later, I searched for Polkadot and discovered Substrate.
PW: How did you decide to use Substrate?
Lurpis: We went through the documentation and compared Cosmos and Polkadot, and tried both for a while. I feel that Cosmos’s code modules are not as complete as Polkadot, so we chose to use Polkadot . We still prefer the well-written documentation, haha.
PW: So you think code integrity is important to you?
Lurpis: Well, of course, when you choose a framework, the more complete the basic components, the better. In terms of completeness, Polkadot is higher. But maybe Cosmos has been updated recently? I haven’t followed them up for a while.
PW: So if Cosmos would perfect the module, would you still consider to choose Cosmos?
Lurpis: Now that we have chosen the side, it would cost a lot to change. We have written a huge bunch of code already, so we won’t possibly change, even if there are some traps, we must face them. I think it is still the developer base of the framework. The larger the base is, the quicker the problem is found and solved. Sometimes the more strenuous part is when you stuck on a problem that no one has encountered, that causes a waste of time.
Qibing Li — Blockchain developer, college student of zhejiang university
PW: How did you first notice Substrate?
Qibing Li: I joined the blockchain industry a bit late. So I mainly learned about Substrate after learning about Polkadot.
PW: Have you ever tried any other technical solution before that?
Qibing Li:: No, not even ETH, just because I joined late. Recently I’m using CITA and JP Morgan’s Quorum alliance chain for a bit😂.
Substrate is currently unstable, but the quality of existing modules is high. Everything in Substrate is relatively new and everyone is willing to use it.
PW: What do you think of Quorum?
Qibing Li: It is an Ethereum-based alliance chain that supports many privacy protection technologies, but does not emphasize cross-chain. But now that cross-chain demand has not yet appeared, Quorum is still a good choice.
PW: Substrate also seems to have a privacy module, right?
Qibing Li:: Someone is doing privacy module for Substrate, mainly SubstreTEE. Enigma, which is a private computing chain, originally planned to use Substrate to develop its own consensus layer. That means to bring private computing functions to the Polkadot ecosystem. But Substrate might not currently have a privacy module. Mainly, the Substrate kernel has a higher priority, and peripheral modules such as privacy and storage will be done by others and access to Polkadot when the kernel is ready. But to Business application requires privacy and storage, so now those applications will use JP Morgan Chase’s solution first. It will take some time for the Substrate alliance chain to actual appliacation.
PW: Substrate’s adoption on the alliance chain requires not only time, but also the recognition and support of really well-known large institutions.
Li Qi handle: Well, Ethereum has an enterprise alliance chain EEA, and JPMorgan Chase is also in it. The Ethereum-based alliance chain Quorum followed with that. I think only when the Polkadot mainnet is valuable, the big institutions will look back at Substrate, it’s kind of chicken-egg relationship.
Flyq— Polkadot Ambassador, blockchain developer
PW: How did you first notice Substrate?
Flyq: It seems to start from Gavin visited Beijing in December 2018, and then I slowly started following Polkadot. I admire Gavin myself. I’ve noticed him when studying Ethereum in the early 2018, but I didn’t really study Polkadot seriously in the first half year of 2018. Participating in your PolkaWorld activities in the second half of the year was a catalyst.
PW: Did you start to study Substrate purely out of interest? or it’s related to the company’s business at the time?
Flyq: My previous company mainly did some dApp development for EOS and ETH. The company has no business related to Substrate. Later I went back and gave them an intro presentation about Substrate ink! Smart contract development😂.
PW: Do you think Rust is a big threshold when studying Substrate?
Flyq: If you write complex business / logic, you still need to be familiar with Rust. The more familiar you are, the better. Otherwise it is very painful to debug, you will stuck in a bunch of errors, and don’t even know how to solve them. But learning Rust while learning Substrate also works. After all many blockchain projects like Polkadot, Near, Nervos, Libra, Conflux, and Grin all use Rust.
Skyh— Bandot Core Development
PW: How did you first notice Substrate?
Skyh: At that time I wanted to check out Cosmos, and my friend introduced me Substrate, and I checked it out myself and found it good. Cross-chain interoperability is always what I want to do.
PW: So you chose Substrate because you want to do something with cross-chain interoperability?
Skyh: Yeah. Before I have also developed on EOS for a year and I was looking for directions. The EOS project has no way out.
PW: Why do you think there is no way out?
Skyh: No one used the wallets I made before anyway.
PW: How is the current Bandot (Substrate-based project) doing?
Skyh: I manage the technical architecture and organize weekly technical sharing. The project is now proceeding as planned. We keep a low profile and didn’t promote much.
PW: When you were building the technical framework, did you find any “traps” in using Substrate?
Skyh: Just well. When the cross-chain feature released, we will follow the rhythm, we can’t call it right now. I think PolkaWorld has been doing a good job. Give you guys a thumbs up. I’ve learned many tutorials from your public account.
How did you first notice Substrate? Did you choose Substrate at the end? Discuss it with us!
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