Polkadot Hello World Article Series

Polkadot Hello World #3: Pre-POC-3 on Substrate is Here

This is the third article of the series, click on the link above the title to get a list of articles.

Around the 15th October (as announced in the following hackmd.io article) the Pre-POC-3 test net called “BBQ-Birch” went life, which is an implementation of a Substrate-based blockchain.

So you may ask, what heck is the difference between Polkadot and Substrate, which was confusing for me at the beginning as well. Let’s clarify the differences, as well as similarities between these two main concepts.

Substrate is a framework for creating cryptocurrencies and other decentralized systems using the latest research in blockchain technology.

As Jack Fransham states on the Parity website in the Substrate Intro article:

It’s important to understand that Parity Substrate is not part of Polkadot at all. Although Polkadot is built with Substrate and projects built with Substrate can run natively on Polkadot, you can use Substrate to build new blockchains right now. You don’t need to wait for Polkadot to be finished or even for a proof-of-concept to be released to start working on a blockchain using this framework...

You can think of it as being like Express or another web application framework, but for building distributed or decentralized systems such as cryptocurrencies or a message bus. Just as most web…