Building blockchains with Polkadot | let's build a proof-of-existence chain!

Abstract: Blockchain upgrades are often a months-long process consisting of planning around forks, and the occurrence of forks themselves. Imagine being able to avoid this process, and just upgrade immediately, or upgrade following a vote? This is only one of the constant problems that Substrate, a L0 blockchain development framework, solves out-of-the-box.

Here are a few special properties of Substrate, in a nutshell:

• Comes with many no-brainers and (swappable) defaults: transaction queue, networking, database, consensus, accounts, balances, and a runtime, specialized for building custom state-transition functions(application-layer).
• Many ready-built modules("pallets") available and configurable for your runtime: WASM smart contracts, governance, multisig, randomness, and more.
• Easy in-roads to building parachains - blockchains that share Polkadot/Kusama's security and message-passing, able to communicate natively amongst one another.
• Production-ready, having been the framework used to build Polkadot, Kusama, and a number of other production blockchains and parachains.

We'll quickly dive into the background of Polkadot and Substrate as an intro. We'll introduce Substrate, and its architecture. Then, we'll use Substrate to develop a proof-of-existence chain. By the end, you should have a base idea of how to start a Substrate project, an understanding of the architecture and file structure, and some understanding of key runtime development concepts such as runtime storage, events, pallets, and extrinsics.

Bio: Justin Frevert is a Solutions Engineer at Parity Technologies, the company building Polkadot, Kusama, and Substrate. Here, Justin helps ensure success for startups who are building on Substrate, as well as some user-facing development.