**Wasm, or WebAssembly, is a “low-level” language designed to complement JS in its execution — written in binary. One of its goals is to make web pages as fast and efficient as machine language. Its development team is from Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and Apple, representing the four major web browsers Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Safari.
While Wasm was originally designed as a virtual machine for browsers, its host independence, security sandbox, and overall simplicity make it an ideal runtime for smart contracts. In addition, it allows contracts to be developed using multiple modern programming languages (Rust, C++, JavaScript, and so on). The Ethereum team has been trialling a WebAssembly-based contract engine, eWasm, and plans to officially release it sometime in 2021. Ethereum isn’t the only blockchain company investigating WebAssembly technology. Many others are betting on this technology ** including Polkadot, NEAR, Tron, EOS, Dfinity and many more — it seems to have become the de facto standard for building a new generation of blockchain networks. ** What scenarios can the Wasm contract be used in?
This year, The Substrate developer Hackathon Polkadot Hackathon organized by ParityAsia attracted a crowd of Substrate technology enthusiasts. Patract has been watching Hackathon live since the early days of the competition and has created a bonus for Wasm contract entries. We recently covered five entries for Hackathon based on the Wasm contract, so read this article with interest.
Just yesterday, 21 teams qualified for Demoday, including four Wasm entries: inkBridge, SubLend, SkyePass, and Ares.
InkBridge uses Wasm contract technology to build the transfer bridge. It can be deployed to all parallel chains that support Wasm contracts, sinking the bridge of multiple public chains (BTC, ETH, etc.) into a platform rather than a single application. Community project parties can invoke existing functions in the form of contracts, and can also use contracts to modify existing functions. We only provide the basic functions of the transfer bridge, support the cross-chain transaction verification in a custom format, and hand over to the upper application to play the product freely.
SubLend is based on Substrate Ink! The implemented loan contract module can be deployed to all parallel chains that support Wasm contracts. Increase the utilization of reserves by offering a credit mandate loan that is similar to a combination of ious and intimate payment, as opposed to the over-collateralized loan model. At the same time, fixed-rate loans are provided to meet the needs of some traditional financial institutions for predictable financial expenditures. It can effectively solve the problem of DeFi loan agreement liquidity of reserves and unpredictable financial expenditure.
SkyePass is a decentralized password and identity management solution (IAM) based on IPFS and Substrate Wasm smart contracts. The ostensible goal is to build an open source, decentralized and scalable alternative to 1Password/Lastpass. Deep hope can realize the public identity and private identity under the chain to provide solutions. The SkyePass entry categories are smart contracts, NFT and social networking.
Ares is a random security prognosticator solution based on Substrate framework that supports hybrid Babe and off chain workers, incorporating boca’s latest on-chain governance and bringing the leading edge of Optimistic Rollup challenge model to the prognosticator realm, supporting INK! Contract, bring better prophecy machine experience to DeFi ecology.
To understand why they chose Wasm contracts and what they think about Wasm contracts as a technology, ** We found Qiu Shui, who is responsible for inkBridge product definition and design of front and back business logic, Xiao Li, who is responsible for writing Token related functions in Sublend, Zhou Song, who is focused on Wasm technology at SkyePass, and Zhou Song, who is responsible for Pallet at Ares The development of the function of the prophecy machine and the interaction with ink contract sent an interview to four developers, **.
Why did you choose the Wasm contract?
Akimi-inkbridge: There are four reasons.
First, Wasm contracts are very simple to write and easy to use. Compared with the flat chain, the development difficulty is lower, without mastering Substrate and XCMP communication protocol and other underlying frameworks, only need to be able to ink framework. It can be said that development is more efficient and cheaper. Our developer students only spent a few days learning to develop.
Second, we are optimistic about boca ecology and full of vision for the future of cross-chain. The current boca ecosystem is more complete with Wasm contract, and Patract development suite to help us save development time.
Third, the project deployment cost is lower. Compared to the parallel chain that requires slots, it only requires one deployment fee, which is low cost and suitable for our small team to start up.
Fourth, Wasm contract is universal. Wasm contract technology is used to build parallel chains that can be deployed to all supporting Wasm contracts. There’s a much wider range of ecosystems to tap into.
Lee-sublend: No need to deploy parallel chains yourself; Try implementing some ideas with INK.
Zhou Song-Skyepass: Some think that the code logic of Substrate Pallet will be general, after all, there is no Pallet library like OpenZeppelin.
On the other hand, as a Substrate native module, there are fewer pits for compatibility, such as the call chain information in the contract. And many of the Solidity pits are basically eliminated by Rust when compiling.
Have you had any suggestions or feelings about using Patract’s development tools?
Akusui -inkBridge: Patract’s contract tools are perfect and easy to use, greatly improving development efficiency. In particular, the combination of Europa and Redspot can be very convenient for developers to debug and deploy contracts. Europa provides Wasm virtual machine stack printing and log printing functions, and developers can determine problems in contract development based on the printed information. Redspot provides scripted contract compilation debugging and deployment to improve development efficiency. Hope to continue to improve and provide more and more powerful tools.
Lee-sublend: Redspot scaffolding provides a similar experience to developing Solidity contracts with Truffle for quick testing and debugging of contracts; Contracts can be deployed directly to the Jupiter test network for teams to test. Our contract was finally deployed on the Jupiter test chain and the developed DApp has been listed on Patract’s PatraStore.
Jsong-skyepass: We mainly used Redspot, which felt like it took us through a lot of potholes and was very friendly for beginners. The general feeling is that there are not enough documents. I suggest that you make a GitHub Readme and add some real project cases. I feel that a lot of difficulties in the development process, document Stackoverflow is a little less, mainly rely on other people’s project code to understand.
Why did you choose to integrate the Wasm contract module design?
Send an Italian Lanzhou -Ares: From the development process of DeFi last year, we found that while Compound, YFI and Uniswap are hot, Chainlink, Nest and Band are also in the swing of prophecy. Only when prophecy can solve the real needs of DeFi and deeply bind with DeFi can it achieve better development. Currently, DeFi is implemented through on-chain contracts. Ares introduces Wasm contract modules to build a DeFi predictor platform for decentralized services, allowing developers to quickly access rich off-chain data in Ares networks without having to learn too much about the underlying blockchain. Quickly build a DeFi application to bring a more native and quality prophecy machine experience to DeFi ecosystem.
What do you think of the Wasm contract technology?
Akusui -inkBridge: Wasm virtual machines are currently the most popular contract execution engine for blockchain, and Wasm contracts have more expressive power and performance than EVM contracts. Support for Rust-based INK! Or AssemblyScript based Ask! The ability to compile into Wasm’s upper level language will attract more developers and allow more complex business logic to be developed.
Lee-sublend: I think this is an opportunity for smart contracts. Previously, you had to learn a specific language, but now you can write contracts in any language that can be compiled into Wasm. This will attract developers from different language backgrounds (Rust, JS, C++, etc.) to join the contract development process, which will increase the number of developers.
Jsong-skyepass: Wasm is what I first learned from EOS. Impressively, Wasm is more rigorous and portable than Solidity. Solidity strikes me as a set of things compared to Hacky, and personally feels like Wasm corrects the unity point. This time around, Substrate Hackathon is developing parallel chains, which feels like a good opportunity to familiarise more developers with the Rust environment. I love Wasm for its own sake, but feel bad that most of the industry’s resources have been left to speculate.
Jilanzhou -Ares: As the latest virtual machine running environment, Wasm is a frontier in the development of blockchain. For those of you who have done contract development on Ethereum EVM, you can see that EVM is difficult to debug and cannot host complex applications. Wasm supports more development languages, allowing developers to quickly start contract development without learning a new language. The commonality of Wasm interface design brings on-chain upgrades, making blockchain no longer troubled by hard forks, and quickly upgrading blockchain nodes through on-chain governance. Another difference is that some pre-compiled contracts written in Ethereum can only be hardcoded. On Boca, new pallets can be developed for Wasm, making it more convenient for developers.
Afterword.
Through this interview, we found that Wasm contract technology has gradually been tried and promising among blockchain technology developers. Finally, let’s wait and see how Wasm can lead a new round of blockchain technology revolution in the future.
Patract, an open platform also focused on boca Wasm contract development, will also launch the Wasm contract system parallel chain complete full development technology to help the community parallel chain design and development of on-chain contract modules and Runtime support. It also provides full stack tools and services support for DApp developers covering development, testing, debugging, deployment, monitoring, data provision and front-end development, accelerating the smart contract industry’s shift to Wasm technology stack.
About Patract
Patract provides solutions for parallel chain and DApp development in boca’s Wasm contract ecosystem. We help the community design and develop on-chain contract module and Runtime support, and provide DApp developers with a full stack of tools and services covering the development, testing, debugging, deployment, monitoring, data provisioning, and front-end development phases.
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