Basics

This section equips developers with the essential knowledge to create, deploy, and enhance applications and blockchains within the Polkadot ecosystem. Gain a comprehensive understanding of Polkadot’s foundational components, including accounts, balances, and transactions, as well as advanced topics like data encoding and cryptographic methods. Mastering these concepts is vital for building robust and secure applications on Polkadot.

By exploring these core topics, developers can leverage Polkadot's unique architecture to build scalable and interoperable solutions. From understanding how Polkadot's networks operate to implementing efficient fee mechanisms and utilizing tools like SCALE encoding, this section provides the building blocks for innovation. Whether you're optimizing blockchain performance or designing cross-chain functionality, these insights will help you navigate Polkadot’s ecosystem with confidence.

In This Section

Networks

Explore Polkadot's testing and production networks, including Westend, Kusama, and Paseo, for efficient development, deployment, and testing.

Accounts

Learn about account structures, balances, and address formats in the Polkadot SDK, including how to manage lifecycle, references, and balances.

Blocks, Transactions, and Fees

Dive into the structure, processing, and lifecycle of blocks and transactions in Polkadot, and learn how fees are calculated and applied.

Interoperability

Explore the importance of interoperability in the Polkadot ecosystem, covering XCM, bridges, and cross-chain communication.

Randomness

Explore the importance of randomness in PoS blockchains, focusing on Polkadot’s VRF-based approach to ensure fairness and security in validator selection.

Cryptography

A concise guide to cryptography in blockchain, covering hash functions, encryption types, digital signatures, and elliptic curve applications.

Data Encoding

SCALE codec enables fast, efficient data encoding, ideal for resource-constrained environments like Wasm, supporting custom types and compact encoding.

Chain Data

Learn how to expose and utilize chain data for blockchain applications. Discover runtime metadata, RPC APIs, and tools for efficient development.