Substrate Essentials

Substrate knowledge base

Substrate

Substrate takes a modular approach to blockchain development and defines a rich set of primitives that allows developers to make use of powerful, familiar programming idioms.

For more information about Substrate, please refer to their in-depth documentation.

Runtime

The runtime of a blockchain is the business logic that defines its behavior. In Substrate-based chains, the runtime is referred to as the "state transition function"; it is where Substrate developers define the storage items that are used to represent the blockchain's state as well as the functions that allow blockchain users to make changes to this state.

How is it related?

Substrate can be used in three ways:

• With the Substrate Node - run node with runtime just by providing chain specification file to node

• With Substrate FRAME - run node with your custom runtime

• With Substrate Core - design and implement runtime from scratch and compile targeting WebAssembly. This is what Subsembly utilises.

Since Substrate supports WebAssembly runtimes, anything that compiles down to that is theoretically able to serve as a Substrate runtime. AssemblyScript is a language very similar to TypeScript that compiles down to WebAssembly and Subsembly is an AssemblyScript framework.