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Building dApps

As with any blockchain, building decentralized applications (dApps) is a huge part of how a developer can build on Polkadot.

As an application developer, you can compose your front-end apps in a few different ways. Because Polkadot and its parachains are all built using Substraste; you can often use the same SDK to communicate with Polkadot, a parachain, or any other Substrate-based chain.

Substrate-based chains use an SS58 encoding for their address formats.

Please see the SS58 registry to see which chain corresponds to a given prefix, and which prefixes are available.

SDKS & Libraries​

If one aims to develop a dApp (Decentralized App), the Polkadot ecosystem contains various SDKs to tap into the relay chain and parachains. There are several languages already supported - see the tooling page for a detailed overview of different SDKs and libraries that are available.

Frameworks & Toolkits​

For front-end applications, several options exist for interfacing with Substrate-based chains (parachains, relay chains, etc.) and smart contracts. These often will interact with the RPC of a Substrate node:

Promise and RxJS APIs around Polkadot and Substrate-based chains via RPC calls. It is dynamically generated based on what the Substrate runtime provides regarding metadata. Full documentation & examples available here.