Introducing Substrate Smart Contracts with Ink

Implementing a non-fungible token written with Ink

ink!: Substrate’s smart contract language

Parity’s Substrate blockchain framework, of which Polkadot is being built on top of, is in active development and making rapid progress towards a final release. Ink (or ink! as the name is commonly termed in documentation) is Parity’s solution to writing smart contracts for a Substrate based blockchain.

Like Substrate, Ink is built on top of Rust, and therefore adheres to Rust language rules and syntax. This talk will walk through an example smart contract replicating a non-fungible token, commonly referred to as ERC721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The contract itself can be found on Github here.

This is Part 1 of a series that will cover the process of creating and deploying this Ink smart contract, specifically, we will cover:

• How to install Substrate and Ink, with its dependencies
• Writing the bare-bones non-fungible token contract that will support 3 main features: minting tokens, transferring tokens, and approving another account to send tokens on your behalf
• How to build and deploy the smart contract on a Substrate blockchain, and test the functions…