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:

Polkadot.js

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.

Polkadot API (under development)

The Polkadot API (formerly known as "CAPI") is currently under development, but will serve as a replacement for Polkadot JS. While still under construction, you may view the current progress on GitHub  here.

Subxt

Query and submit extrinsics (transactions) to a Substrate node via RPC using Rust. Also referred to as Rust Parity. Full documentation & examples available here.

React Hooks for ink!

React hooks library for ink! smart contracts that abstract the functionality of polkadot.js. Full documentation & examples available here.

ink!athon Boilerplate

ink!athon is a starter kit for full-stack dApp development with ink! smart contracts and a React-based frontend in one place. With convenient helper scripts and a pre-configured project setup, you can quickly scaffold any dApp. Live example & full documentation available here.

Polkadot Cloud

Polkadot Cloud hosts a library of assets, ranging from data sources, graphical elements, to fully functional components, for app developers to plug and play into their codebases.  Learn more here.