Why Substrate Based Polkadot is the Next Big Thing in Crypto Sphere?

If you’re actively following the news in the crypto and blockchain industry, you probably noticed that everyone’s talking about Polkadot, which is supposed to be the next big thing in the crypto sphere. The main reason why Polkadot is so popular is Substrate. 

This article will explain what Substrate is and how it works. Moreover, we’ll list why it’s so great and give a concrete example of how Substrate supports some great Polkadot-related projects. Read on.

What Is Substrate?

Substrate is a software development kit supporting Polkadot. Developers can use it to create customized blockchains that will run entirely autonomously, meaning they won’t require any external technology to operate. You can think of Substrate as a blockchain framework that helps with blockchain creation on Polkadot. Mind you, Substrate itself isn’t a blockchain but rather a tool for creating them. In fact, Polkadot itself is created with the help of Substrate, which effectively makes it the main technology behind the famous project.

Without further ado, let’s list the five reasons Substrate is so powerful.  

1. Substrate Is Developed by Parity, a Company Co-Founded by Gavin Wood

The company that came up with Substrate is Parity, and one of Parity’s co-founders is Gavin Wood. When his name appeared in Polkadot’s presentations, many crypto enthusiasts and professional investors immediately became interested in what Substrate (and, consequently, Polkadot) had to offer.

Namely, Gavin Wood was also one of Ethereum’s co-founders, meaning he was already popular in the crypto and blockchain communities. After all, Ethereum was groundbreaking, so Wood’s followers immediately saw his genius at work once again.

One of the main reasons Wood left Ethereum is that he wasn’t persuaded that Ethereum was doing its best to pursue its primary goal: an entirely decentralized ecosystem. He started to think of it as yet another network competing for its place among other blockchains, with each chain being an entity of its own, unable to communicate with others.

2. Substrate Reduces the Time, Money, and Energy Required to Create a Blockchain

Substrate is designed so that anyone who has at least some experience with creating blockchains can do it very quickly. Since it’s a framework with pre-determined functionality, you just need to configure it to your liking, launch it, and focus on business logic rather than dealing with the technical aspects of blockchain creation. 

According to some claims, you can build a blockchain via Substrate in 15 minutes. That said, you definitely want to spend more time than that to avoid mistakes.

3. Substrate Has Plenty of Potential for Growth

Substrate is already a powerful tool attracting many individuals and organizations. The best part is that it’s still very new, which means there’s plenty of room to explore its possibilities, update it, add new functionalities, etc. The popular SDK was developed by some of the brightest minds in the crypto industry, and they’re probably holding a couple of aces up their sleeves to improve Substrate further. 

4. Substrate Is a Great Starting Point for Anyone Who Wants to Become a Blockchain Developer

Substrate’s backend was built in Rust, which is quite similar to JavaScript and follows a similar logic to C++. Therefore, if you have some experience in working with JS, you probably won’t have to spend much time learning Substrate from the beginning.

Blockchain development, however, involves more than simply understanding programming, as Substrate can help you learn more about blockchain logic and philosophy.

5. Substrate Supports Great Polkadot Projects   

We can already see plenty of outstanding projects related to Substrate, so let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

T3rn is a platform focusing on smart contract hosting, intending to offer interoperable execution of smart contracts. It has in-built fail-safe mechanisms to ensure multi-chain execution. On top of that, it features a registry for smart contracts where developers can submit their code and get paid whenever someone uses their contract. The popular project joined the Substrate Builders Program, meaning it was acknowledged by Parity, which runs the program in search of exciting projects.

Polkadex is a cryptocurrency exchange that’s completely decentralized and peer-to-peer based. It follows the orderbook approach and is built on Substrate. The main goal of Polkadex is to combine the advantages of both centralized and decentralized crypto exchange platforms using a single state-of-the-art technology. The underlying technology also allows high liquidity and fast transactions. The project is accepted as a member of the DeFi Alliance and is supported by Web3 Grant.

Manta Network is another excellent Polkadot-based project focusing on privacy. In other words, it aims to ensure that the communication between different blockchains remains anonymous and private. The project focuses on zk-SNARK cryptography, which stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. It allows one party to prove that it has specific information without revealing it. The project managed to collect $5.5 million in funding, with some of the popular crypto hedge funds, such as CoinFund, supporting it.

Bottom Line: Can Polkadot Be an Ethereum Killer?

As you can see, Polkadot is on a roll, with many investors interested in obtaining DOT and supporting the project. More importantly, many projects are interested in getting a Polkadot blockchain and becoming part of the network, harnessing all its advantages. All of that, of course, wouldn’t be possible without the software development kit known as Substrate, which made the entire blockchain-creating process much easier compared to the competition. 

As to whether Polkadot will be the Ethereum killer — it remains to be seen. However popular, Polkadot is nowhere near the popularity of Ethereum, although Gavin Wood and the team are very serious in their goal to become better than Ethereum and lay the foundations for Web 3.0.