General-grants-program: Development: Create new parachains for Polkadot

We would like to invite teams to discuss developing new parachains for Polkadot.

Parachains introduction

The following links will be useful reading for starting to understand what parachains are and how to implement them:

• "Polkadot: the parachain" - a blog by Robert Habermeier.
• Preparing to build on Polkadot - a blog mainly focussed on building parachains

Implementing a parachain is not likely to be a simple task, but it should get easier over time as more examples and more documentation become available.

To implement a parachain, developers need to implement a state transition validation function, decide upon a state format, and a transaction pooling mechanism. Once you’ve implemented your parachain, there are a couple of extra steps involved in integrating it with Polkadot. To do this you will need to deploy the state transition validation function onto the Relay Chain, then distribute a collator node client that includes the transaction pooling mechanism.

Creating all of these pieces requires thinking about how a collator node should construct the blocks of your chain and how the validity of these blocks can be checked and confirmed by a validator node. There are two options here: (1) write the collator node from scratch, or (2) use a shell collator node that can run different kinds of state machines. At the time of writing, we don’t have the specs for writing a collator node, although more details will be forthcoming as more PoCs are release.

Substrate

We expect many parachains will be built on Substrate; however, a parachain could also be built from scratch.

For more information on Substrate, please see the following links:

Web3 Wiki

• Substrate

Presentations

• Gavin Wood presents Parity Substrate at EventHorizon18,
  The slides: Slides.com
• Robert Habermeier also presented Parity Substrate at the Berlin Truebit Meetup.

Blogs

• "What is Substrate?" Jack Fransham explains.
• "Substrate in a nutshell" by Dmitriy Kashitsyn.
• "Substrate testnet launched" by Phil Lucsok.
• "Launch a blockchain in minutes with Substrate" by Phil Lucsok.

Tutorials

• Creating a custom Substrate chain
• Deploying a Substrate Node chain
• How to build a Custom Substrate Module from scratch (Community blog)

Blockchains using Substrate Today

• Polkadot - Polkadot Relaychain implementation.
• Shasper - Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain implementation.
• ChainX - cross-chain digital asset management platform.
• Edgeware - incentivised testnet for active governance.

Parachain Collaboration Form

Please provide further details by filling out the following form:

Link