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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. Within the ecosystem, you also hear the term "Unstoppable App", or uApp. While the naming isn't too important, what is important is building resilient applications using decentralized technology.

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) or uApp (Unstoppable 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.