Introducing Patract: the Polkadot Smart Contract Developer Center

Patract provides solutions for Polkadot’s Parachain Contract ecosystem, and we are announcing the establishment of Patract as the Polkadot Wasm smart contract developer center. The Patract Hub projects had been reviewed by the Polkadot Council and funded by the Polkadot Treasury. It provides free development toolkits and services to contract developers of the Polkadot ecosystem and will operate as a non-profit community-based organization.

There are two options for participating in the Polkadot ecosystem. One is to run as a parachain on Substrate. This way is difficult to develop, and iteration speed is slow. The most important thing is that the Polkadot relay chain supports up to 100 parachains, and it will be slowly expanded, resulting in a very expensive slot auction. It can be estimated that it will require at least 10 million DOT, and it will need to be locked for several months. In the future, there will be very few Polkadot projects that can run as a parachain.

The second way is to develop smart contract applications through the smart contract parachain deployed by the web3 foundation or community. This way has low development difficulty and fast iteration speed. To develop a contract, you do not need to understand the complex structure of the underlying chains, you only need to care about your own business logic. Contract parachains are open for deployment, similar to platforms like Ethereum. In order to complete their own contract application deployment, any developer only needs to spend a small amount of DOT for gas fees and continuously increase DOT deposits based on future storage usage. The contract can also be migrated and destroyed at any time, releasing storage deposits. In addition, Patract plans to directly use DOT to pay fees and participating in governance, but the Polkadot contract pallet is not yet fully mature, so other details are yet to be determined.

The Substrate framework currently supports two types of contracts, one is the EVM contract directly compatible with Ethereum, and the other is the more advanced native Wasm contract, developed using a more advanced ink! language derived from Rust. Patract mainly provides development support for Wasm contracts and may develop new contract languages, such as supporting C++, JS, etc. Ink! supports developers to write complex smart contract logic and provides logical organization capabilities higher than Solidity. The execution efficiency of Wasm is also higher than that of EVM. Together with Polkadot’s own NPoS consensus, the transaction throughput of Polkadot’s contract parachain can be much higher than that of the Ethereum platform, and the cost will be reduced greatly. It can support millions of contracts on a single parachain deployed and run at the same time, providing a wider range of ecological collaboration.

Patract has written development plans for 10 recent projects on Polkassembly. Among them, the first 4 projects have been approved in the last two months of discussions. The first 2 projects have been partially developed and put into the community for use, and other projects will be finished in the future.

1. Jupiter: A smart contract test network for developers to conduct early trials. Jupiter will integrate the latest Wasm contract technology and configure the most suitable blockchain environment for development and testing.

2. Redspot: Wasm contract development workflow and scaffold. Redspot can standardize contract development, shield the underlying compilation details, and connect to other tools as a core component of Patract.

3. Europa: Runtime and contract running sandbox. Europa is an independent and complete running environment for Runtime that includes a contract pallet. It does not require consensus and P2P, so can quickly develop and debug contracts.

4. Elara: Instant and scalable Polkadot API. Elara provides RPC interfaces for relay chains and parachains, saving developers the trouble of deploying and operating multi-chain nodes.

5. Metis: Ink! contract standard library. Metis will develop the corresponding standard library implementation for each standard of the Polkadot contract and conduct audits to ensure safety.

6. Himalia: Multi-language contract SDK. Himalia supports developers to interact with contracts in multiple development languages ​​from different terminals, including PatractJ, PatractPy, PatractGo, etc.

7. Leda: Contract monitor. Leda will monitor the key data of the contract in development, testing, deployment, and operation so that developers can know the status of the contract in real-time.

8. Carpo: Smart cloud IDE. Carpo will automatically integrate all development toolkits, plug-ins, and services of Patract on the server-side, saving developers the trouble of setting up and configuring a local development environment.

9. PatraScan: Polkadot multi-chain explorer, which provides display, analysis, search, and API of relay chain, parachain, and contract module data.

10. PatraStore: Polkadot multi-chain application market, tracking, recording, and recommending multi-chain DApps to help users quickly browse the Polkadot ecosystem.

Based on the above projects, Patract is hiring blockchain engineers, Wasm engineers, senior back-end engineers, senior front-end engineers, ink! contract engineers, ZK engineers, UI designers, product managers, operations managers, etc. The location is in Future Technology City, Hangzhou, China, welcome all experts in the industry to join, please contact sean@patractlabs.com

For details on the development of Patract, you can follow the website update (https://patract.io), and the project pages will be updated in the near future. You can also go to Github to view the source code (https://github.com/patractlabs) or go to Element The community participates in the discussion (https://app.element.io/#/room/#PatractLabsDev:matrix.org), and developers and friends are welcome to build the Patract Hub.