Technical Perspectives | After two years of developing DApps and Layer 2 networks, I switched to the Substrate camp

1. Dapp based on smart contract
2. Layer 2 network solution
3. fork Ethereum

But these three solutions have more or less shortcomings in terms of development operation and maintenance cost, performance and flexibility. The relatively low cost of smart contract development, operation and maintenance is a major advantage. But limited by the underlying public chain platform, the logic that can actually be implemented is limited . For example, it is currently difficult to verify ed25519-based signatures on Ethereum. At the same time, the project needs to compete for resources with various other applications on the same platform . For example, when ERC20's Tether transfers are more frequent, or when a spinach project is very hot, users need to spend more transfer fees for each transaction of the smart contract, and the transaction confirmation will be slower.

1. High degree of abstraction, more general and less development work. In fact, with the help of templates provided by the framework, developers only need to pay attention to the storage, function logic, and event writing required for their applications. Applications such as crypto cats are a few hundred small in total in an application chain Line of code. At the same time, using the official front-end, you can directly interact with the chain without additional programming. Being able to do this is inseparable from Parity's accumulated development experience with multiple blockchain clients.
2. The ecology of the surrounding tools is relatively complete. For example, based on the official front-end library, it is easy to develop the front-end interactive page of the application chain. Based on official and third-party rpc client libraries, it is easy to write custom rpc clients.
3. Since all Runtimes (application logic) are written in Wasm, Substrate-based application chains can support online upgrades . In other words, after an on-chain governance has passed an upgrade resolution, the full node will run the latest version of logic even if the software is not manually upgraded. This feature makes the on-chain governance and upgrade seamless, and the experience is closer to the upgrade in traditional software development, which basically solves the governance and upgrade issues of the above three solutions.
4. At present, the official has given WASM and EVM modules. If you want to develop a chain that supports smart contracts , it will be very, very fast.

The two points 1 and 2 make Substrate-based application chain development very friendly to small teams . In the case of being familiar with Rust, it can be said that the workload of developing a Substrate application chain is basically the same as developing an Ethereum Dapp. This is why all of our recent hackathons can be developed in a short time.