The Swankiest Way to Build on Polkadot!
What is Swanky?
Swanky is a fun and simple way to build a WASM Smart Contract. We are building a one-stop tool for building on Polkadot with WASM.
Why is this an essential tool for WASM developers?
It’s simple, why not have a suite of tools that does everything from compiling, deploying, and running unit and RPC tests.
Swanky Suite simplifies like no other! That is what makes building dApps easier with a Swanky All-in-one Suite for all your tooling needs! The best part is that Web3 developers with prior experience with other CLI tools will have an equal or better experience using Swanky Suite.
In a sense, you can say Swanky aims to be the Truffle of WASM!
Why WASM for smart contracts?
We want to share our passion for why WASM Smart Contracts are an exciting evolution of existing EVM Smart Contracts. They require a smart contract execution environment or a virtual machine which is pretty standard. Once you scrape the surface, though, things get a bit Swanky!
The beauty of WASM smart contracts is that running hardware-intensive dApps gives you native performance. It’s hard to deny its use case when industry leaders such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all using WASM. When it comes to EVM, there are various limitations with its bytecode having depth limits from creating more complex smart contracts. The bytecode also requires building compilers from scratch, obscure syntax, and its operations running at 256-bit; this will be significantly cumbersome when computing these operations.
The question is, why reinvent the wheel when you can get Swanky?
The importance of tooling
Developers who have dug into WASM smart contracts know the need for such a great utility as Swanky Suite. A Lot of the other ecosystems have a solid foundation around developer communities, documentation, and tooling. With enough adoption and education, web3 developers or other web2 developers would gravitate toward thriving smart contract developer communities. These devs are the heart of these ecosystems.
Existing tooling for Substrate/Polkadot
The biggest factors include the lack of documentation and the fragmentation of tooling in Substrate. Most tools are either very limited or outdated. Projects use tools such as ink!, redspot, or cargo contracts. Regarding Redspot, it has been almost a year since there have been any development updates in their GitHub. With the lack of updates, using the newest version of Polkadot.JS is challenging, requiring various workarounds to get it working.
So current tools such as ink! and ink!’s testnet Canvas are starting to see some use. Even though they are starting to see adoption, it does take a bit more time to use, making Swanky Suite much more needed.
So what’s currently happening is that Astar Network and various other teams have seen this as an opportunity to help Swankify our experience by building libraries of contract-pallets with local test environments to be used to deploy the future of dApps!
So this is where Swanky Suite was born!
How are other ecosystems doing it?
Well, let’s first look at the Solidity community.
The Solidity community is the oldest community in smart contract development. EVM developers have a lot of first-party and third-party resources, making it simple to start working on smart contracts. Some of their most popular toolings include Truffle and Hardhat. With this much development, we see why many developers choose EVM.
Let us check out other RUST-based communities such as Solana, Cosmos, and Near.
Solana community has some great CLI tools. Their documentation is easily accessible, and 3rd party devs have been active on youtube for tutorials. They have a large community of developers from the Rust community and have seen some adoption from web2 developers.
Cosmos community has been very active with smart contract development. They compile their chain with Cosmwasm, which is very close to Substrate and uses Rust as a base language. They have a large community of developers and easily accessible CLI tooling with many tutorials. Web3 smart contract developers have gravitated towards the cosmos ecosystem because of their direction of building dApps rather than focusing on security, compared to the Polkadot ecosystem focusing more towards security first and then dApps 2nd.
NEAR community has a very similar architecture to Polkadot compared to other ecosystems mentioned. When NEAR protocol utilizes WASM to compile, it requires various stages of smart contract development. With tooling, they have made it easy to access third-party websites such as Awesome NEAR and first-party documentation, making the developer community very welcoming to new devs in the space.
Within the Polkadot community, it’s very early in the smart contract development stage. Most development is still fairly small, allowing individuals to build closely with some of the swankiest minds in the space!
How Swanky is different
One thing Swanky differs from the rest is the all-in-one experience. For instance, in the Polkadot ecosystem, most libraries and standardization could be more cohesive. The problem is that most ecosystems tend to have their CLI tool separate from a local node, making testing local environments a bit more challenging.
Without proper tooling, the development will prolong and become less streamlined, regarding the effects of the development cycle of the dApp, including costs and your precious time. We don’t think this is Swanky enough to get our approval!
The Swanky vision
Swanky strives to be the one-stop shop for WASM smart contracts on Polkadot. With projects standardizing the usage of ink! smart contracts, which makes Swanky the tool for the Polkadot ecosystem. With enough team development, we can create a tool everyone can use to build some Swanky smart contracts. Our vision is for the community to take Swanky Suite to greater heights than we can anticipate. With our community, we can build something that will benefit the whole ecosystem! It’s up to the community to Swankify our future!
The Swanky v1 features
Some of these updates are the Swankiest we have ever seen! These features include supporting multiple contracts such as Phala’s Phat contracts, implementing Swanky accounts, and more supported languages.
Here are some examples of what other Swankers can do:
- Utilize Rmrk in a Swanky node to deploy multi-resource nfts in a dApp!
- Use of Swanky Suite to communicate with cross-chain messages with XCM!
- Deploy a local node with Swanky to send an RMRK extrinsic on-chain using phat contracts!
- Use WASM showcase dApps, such as Uniswap V2 dex
The Swanky future
We are barely scratching the surface regarding mass adoption for web2 developers interested in web3 development. The future is bright for Swanky. There is plenty of Swankage to build regarding WASM Smart contracts and the entire ecosystem using them.
We’re excited to see more ability to import and program use with other projects, more in-depth documentation, more support from other Swankers in other ecosystems, and a better UI/UX experience!
It’s becoming a huge shift in development that will require years of documentation and education. So let’s start building and get ready to swank your game up!
How can you get started?
- Learn more about Swanky Suite on our Linktree — https://linktr.ee/swankywasm
- Check out our Docs on Swanky — https://docs.astar.network/docs/wasm/sc-dev/swanky
Are you passionate about becoming a Swanker?
Look no further. Join the Swankers Ambassadorship and Swanky your Game up!
Start by Joining our Telegram — https://t.me/SwankySuite
About Swanky Suite
Swanky Suite is the “all-in-one” tool for WASM smart contract developers.
Swanky Suite is the tool that enables all Web3 developers to have a seamless all-in-one experience for WASM smart contracts! It is based on existing tools like cargo contract CLI and polkadot.js by extending additional features. Swanky generates a new smart contract environment based on example projects and provides an instant finality node called Swanky node, which shortens the contract development lifecycle.
