Substrate Blockchains and Runtime Modules: An Introduction

Get started developing with Substrate and runtime modules

Parity’s Substrate blockchain framework has been in heavy development in recent months, coinciding with the development of the Polkadot blockchain that is being built on top of Substrate itself.

This piece aims to cover how to start building custom Substrate chains that can support your own Runtime modules:

• We’ll run through a Substrate chain installation and setup
• Explore Substrate chain configuration and how to browse chain state using Polkadot JS
• Dedicate time to introduce the structure of a Runtime Module, a means of adding functionality to your chain

Developing on Substrate

Substrate and the coinciding runtime modules are developed with Rust, a statically typed language that offers speed and reliability with its memory safety features.

This is a subject often brushed aside in blockchain development, but is vitally important for adoption: how to tackle Rust. We won’t be analysing Rust code in this piece, but this will be a pre-requisitive concern for developers interested in Substrate.

How to tackle Rust for newcomers