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Background Information |
While we wait for the node template to build, let's learn a little bit about blockchains and the Substrate blockchain development framework. The Node Template that you are compiling was built with this framework.
Blockchain networks are composed of individual nodes that are connected by a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Nodes are the individual computers on a network running the blockchain software that makes everything work.
To function, a blockchain node needs:
- Storage
- Peer-to-peer networking
- Consensus capabilities
- Extrinsic handling (more than just transactions)
- A Runtime
- and more...
These technologies span a wide breadth of computer science, and so blockchains usually require teams of experts to develop. As a result, most blockchain projects are not developed from the ground up. Instead, these projects are forked from existing blockchain projects. For instance:
- The Bitcoin repository was forked to create: Litecoin, ZCash, Namecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc...
- The Ethereum repository was forked to create: Quorum, POA Network, KodakCoin, Musicoin, etc...
Building blockchains in this way has serious limitations as these existing platforms were not designed with modification in mind.
Substrate is an open source, modular, and extensible framework for building blockchains.
Substrate has been designed from the ground up to be flexible and allow innovators to design and build a blockchain network that meets their needs. It provides all the core components you need to build a customized blockchain node.
We provide an out-of-the-box working Substrate-based node in the form of the Node Template, which should be compiling as you read this. Without making any changes, you and your friends could share this node template and create a working blockchain network with a cryptocurrency and everything!
We will teach you how to use this node in "development" mode, which allows you to run a network with a single node, and have some pre-configured user accounts with funds.