This application is a side-effect of our grant for developing substraTEE. During the implementation of substraTEE we also implemented a Rust websocket client for substrate, released as substrate-api-client. That client is kept very simple and serves its purpose for substaTEE, but at the current state it is more of a code sample than of a production library for general use. Examples show how to query chain state, send transfers and listen to events.
On riot, we realized that there's a substantial interest in the dev community for a substrate client written in Rust.
Features to be added to the existing code base
- dynamic API, parsing runtime metadata (current API is static)
- automatically chose correct signature for accounts based on metadata (Edwards or Schnorr)
- request list of modules and their functions (i.e. for printing these to stdout for debugging)
- generic type arguments for runtime types like Balances, AccountId aso.
- the library shall support composing extrinsics to custom runtime modules
- deploy and call ink contracts
- support custom structs for runtime
While we will aim to provide similar support like polkadot-js-api, we're not building a UI nor an interactive shell. So there will be no interactive browsing of state, modules, functions. As account creation and management is already provided by parity's subkey, we won't add that to our library neither.
- Devs can easily write Rust clients for their custom chains. (Today, oo7 and Polkadot-API-js are the quasi standards for web browsers but there is no standard yet for native applications)
Our team is interested in continuing the development of substrate-api-client because we see interest in the community for our value proposition. Moreover, it accelerates Alain Brenzikofer's private not-for-profit cryptocurrency&DID project encointer.org.
- Alain Brenzikofer: @brenzi on github, Department Head, Developer
- Marcel Frei: @electronix on github, Project Manager for substraTEE, Developer
- Christian Langenbacher: @clang on github, Developer
- Sabine Proll: @sabinep, Developer
- Juraj Skripsky: @jskripsky on github, Rust-Guru, Reviewer
Swiss AG
As an engineering services company SCS AG has more than 25 years of experience in the fields of electronics, software and system design. Profound know-how, solid methodological competence as well as efficient project management are the foundation of our success.
Most programming experience in the following languages: C/C++, C#, Java, Python and VHDL.
Alain Brenzikofer follows Blockchain developments since 2011. He works for SCS since 2012 where he started working on blockchain projects in 2016 and was appointed to lead a new department for "Decentralized Systems" in summer 2018. As a private initiative, he designed a new cryptocurrency ecosystem encointer - An Ecological, Egalitarian and Private Cryptocurrency and Self-Sovereign Identity System . A project he currently intends to realize based on Substrate (including this privacy extension).
Our team is part of the Quartierstrom project, implementing and currently field-testing a decentralized P2P energy market in Switzerland together with ETHZ, Bosch IoT Lab, HSLU and others. SCS is in charge of the development of a dynamic grid usage-tariff smart contract as well as privacy-by-design concepts for the decentralized energy auction, thereby investigating and evaluating Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Linkable Ring Signatures, Multi-Party Computation as well as Trusted Execution Environments.
Moreover, we've developed a PoC for Electric Vehicle charging process on blockchain based on Parity Ethereum: https://youtu.be/xJUKNlV79pg
For trusted sensor oracles, Alain wrote a whitepaper on decentralized trusted timestamping.
Alain, Marcel and Christian are the core developers for substraTEE.
A few further blockchain projects are subject to NDAs.
- https://github.com/scs/substraTEE
- https://github.com/scs
- https://github.com/brenzi
- https://github.com/encointer
(Not all on LinkedIn)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-brenzikofer-9a4480165/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-langenbacher-baa629182/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juraj-skripsky-4338a217/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabine-proll-5a7118153/
We intend to base this work package on substrate-api-client.
Tasks have been described above.
As substrate isn't stable yet, we will deliver based on recent upstream commit. Ongoing integration work is not part of the requested budget.
- T0: Project start: favorably by end of July 2019
- M1: T0 + 4 weeks (subject to holiday plans, TBD when start date is known)