Substrate Connect

Substrate Connect

Substrate connect provides a way to interact with substrate based blockchains in the browser without using an RPC server. Substrate connect uses a smoldot WASM light client to securely connect to the blockchain network without relying on specific 3rd parties.

Due to browser limitations on websockets from https pages, establishing a good number of peers is difficult as many nodes need to be available with TLS. Substrate connect provides a browser extension to overcome this limitation and to keep the chains synced in the background, which makes your apps faster.

When building an app with substrate connect, it will detect whether the user has the extension and use it, or create the WASM light client in-page for them.

Substrate connect builds on Polkadot JS so building an app is the same experience as with using a traditional RPC server node.

The substrate connect API documentation is published here.

Development

This repository is using pnpm workspaces.

We are tracking our work and milestones in a github project.

Please see our contributing guidelines for details on how we like to work and how to smoothly contribute to the project.

Getting Started

  1. Clone the whole substrate-connect repository.
git clone https://github.com/paritytech/substrate-connect.git
  1. Install all dependencies
pnpm install
  1. Compile all packages and projects
pnpm build

To clean up all build artefacts in workspaces in the repository, run:

pnpm clean

To clean up all build artefacts and dependencies in workspaces in the repository, run:

pnpm deep-clean

Run local version of Smoldot Extension

Running the following command will build all necessary dependencies and run the Smoldot Extension in development mode with hot reloading enabled. Once run a new (Chrome) browser will appear with the extension added.

pnpm dev:extension

(Make sure to run $ pnpm install before.)

Run local version of Burnr wallet

Running the following command will build all necessary dependencies and run the Substrate Burnr Wallet in development mode with hot reloading enabled. It will be served on http://localhost:1234/

pnpm dev:burnr

(Make sure to run $ pnpm install before.)

Deployments and releases

Substrate Connect Extension

A Browser extension that keeps the latest state of well known substrate-based chains' specs and bootnodes (Polkadot, Kusama, Rococo, Westend) synced across tabs - using Substrate Connect and Smoldot light client;

The Extension is using Substrate Connect and Smoldot light client node modules. This extension, upon browser initiation updates and synchronizes in the well known substrate chain specs (Polkadot, Kusama, Rococo, Westend), keeping them to the latest state inside the extension, for faster chain sync. When a dApp that supports Substrate Connect (e.g. polkadotJS apps) starts in a browser's tab, then it receives the latest specs from the Extension instead of wrap-syncing from the last imported inside the dApp; At the same time, the dApp will appear inside the Extension as "connected" - meaning that it is using the Extension's bootnodes and specs;

Useful Links:

Substrate Connect Documentation Page

Download at:

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