Nowadays everybody’s focus seems to be on general-purpose smart contract blockchains, particularly Ethereum.

That makes sense, the entrance barrier is not too high, solidity is fairly simple, the costs to deploy a Dapp is low, a lot of dev tools are available and people in the space are familiar with it.

But every general-purpose blockchains comes at a cost, let’s see how.

If deployment of arbitrary code on a blockchain is allowed and no security measures are in place some troublesome code might be deployed, an example being a piece of code that runs forever. Some of this security measures might be familiar to you under the name of “gas fees”.

The issue should be quite clear. If a deployed Dapp is less general than the hosting blockchain (which must be the case) then the Dapp is paying for security measures it itself doesn’t need.

The ecosystem efforts and resources seems to be focused on making Ethereum scale with the goal of lowering gas fees. For the reasons stated above to me this is approaching the problem from a dead angle. In addition to this all the so-called Layer 2 are making the ecosystem extremely complex from an UX point of view.

What about Dapps building and running on their own self-tailored blockchains? This is what was happening in the cryptocurrencies space in the pre-ethereum era.

However, as seen in the past, taking this road comes with some issues:

1. Blockchains development requires great expertise to get right and great expertise is expensive.

2. Upgrading our Dapp would mean having to upgrade the blockchains which requires some degree community off-chain coordination.

3. Gathering a community of miners or validators to keep the blockchain safe and decentralised is also expensive and resource intensive.

4. Blockchains cannot communicate, which means our Dapp would be completely isolated from the world.

In the following sections we are going to tackle this 4 problems.

Parity is a company that developed a Bitcoin client, an Ethereum client and the Polkadot client. By doing this they noticed most the code in the 3 clients was the same.

So they took the overlapping code and made a framework out of it: Substrate.

Substrate makes blockchain development way easier, the entrance barrier is still high but way lower than implementing a blockchain from scratch. Which means it solves problem 1: Blockchains development requires great expertise to get right and great expertise is expensive.

In addition to this blockchains built using substrate allow for upgrades that can be deployed as a normal transaction. No forks needed. This gets rid of problem 2: Upgrading our Dapp would mean having to upgrade the blockchains which requires some degree community off-chain coordination.

Polkadot is a blockchain developed using substrate. It’s a so-called layer 0. It allows for other blockchains to attach to it.

Blockchains connected to polkadot, called parachains, inherit it’s security and decentralization. Remember that a system is as secure as its weakest point. Connecting to polkadot is still expensive, but way less expensive than building your own community of miners and validators. This gets rid of problem 3: Gathering a community of miners or validators to keep the blockchain safe and decentralised is also expensive and resource intensive.

Blockchains connected to polkadot are able to communicate and send arbitrary messages to each other. This creates a rich ecosystem of blockchains that can interoperate with each other and gets rid of problem 4: Blockchains cannot communicate, which means our Dapp would be completely isolated from the world.

I believe Substrate and Polkadot are approaching the problem from a good angle. However the ecosystem is still ripe: it’s lacking tools for developers and the UX for non-technical people is kind of bad. As of now it’s probably not worth it to port your project to this ecosystem, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Nowadays everybody’s focus seems to be on general-purpose smart contract blockchains, particularly Ethereum.

That makes sense, the entrance barrier is not too high, solidity is fairly simple, the costs to deploy a Dapp is low, a lot of dev tools are available and people in the space are familiar with it.

But every general-purpose blockchains comes at a cost, let’s see how.

If deployment of arbitrary code on a blockchain is allowed and no security measures are in place some troublesome code might be deployed, an example being a piece of code that runs forever. Some of this security measures might be familiar to you under the name of “gas fees”.

The issue should be quite clear. If a deployed Dapp is less general than the hosting blockchain (which must be the case) then the Dapp is paying for security measures it itself doesn’t need.

The ecosystem efforts and resources seems to be focused on making Ethereum scale with the goal of lowering gas fees. For the reasons stated above to me this is approaching the problem from a dead angle. In addition to this all the so-called Layer 2 are making the ecosystem extremely complex from an UX point of view.

What about Dapps building and running on their own self-tailored blockchains? This is what was happening in the cryptocurrencies space in the pre-ethereum era.

However, as seen in the past, taking this road comes with some issues:

1. Blockchains development requires great expertise to get right and great expertise is expensive.

2. Upgrading our Dapp would mean having to upgrade the blockchains which requires some degree community off-chain coordination.

3. Gathering a community of miners or validators to keep the blockchain safe and decentralised is also expensive and resource intensive.

4. Blockchains cannot communicate, which means our Dapp would be completely isolated from the world.

In the following sections we are going to tackle this 4 problems.

Parity is a company that developed a Bitcoin client, an Ethereum client and the Polkadot client. By doing this they noticed most the code in the 3 clients was the same.

So they took the overlapping code and made a framework out of it: Substrate.

Substrate makes blockchain development way easier, the entrance barrier is still high but way lower than implementing a blockchain from scratch. Which means it solves problem 1: Blockchains development requires great expertise to get right and great expertise is expensive.

In addition to this blockchains built using substrate allow for upgrades that can be deployed as a normal transaction. No forks needed. This gets rid of problem 2: Upgrading our Dapp would mean having to upgrade the blockchains which requires some degree community off-chain coordination.

Polkadot is a blockchain developed using substrate. It’s a so-called layer 0. It allows for other blockchains to attach to it.

Blockchains connected to polkadot, called parachains, inherit it’s security and decentralization. Remember that a system is as secure as its weakest point. Connecting to polkadot is still expensive, but way less expensive than building your own community of miners and validators. This gets rid of problem 3: Gathering a community of miners or validators to keep the blockchain safe and decentralised is also expensive and resource intensive.

Blockchains connected to polkadot are able to communicate and send arbitrary messages to each other. This creates a rich ecosystem of blockchains that can interoperate with each other and gets rid of problem 4: Blockchains cannot communicate, which means our Dapp would be completely isolated from the world.

I believe Substrate and Polkadot are approaching the problem from a good angle. However the ecosystem is still ripe: it’s lacking tools for developers and the UX for non-technical people is kind of bad. As of now it’s probably not worth it to port your project to this ecosystem, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.