A set of tools for writing Substrate-based Polkadot parachains. Refer to the included overview for architectural details, and the Cumulus workshop for a hand-holding walkthrough of using these tools.
It's easy to write blockchains using Substrate, and the overhead of writing parachains' distribution, p2p, database, and synchronization layers should be just as low. This project aims to make it easy to write parachains for Polkadot by leveraging the power of Substrate.
Cumulus clouds are shaped sort of like dots; together they form a system that is intricate, beautiful and functional.
cumulus-consensus is a
consensus engine for Substrate
that follows a Polkadot
relay chain. This will run a
Polkadot node internally, and dictate to the client and synchronization algorithms which chain to
follow,
finalize,
and treat as best.
The cumulus-runtime is wrapper around Substrate runtimes that provides parachain
validation capabilities and proof-generation routines.
A Polkadot collator for the parachain is
implemented by cumulus-collator.
Rococo is the testnet for parachains. It currently runs the parachains Tick, Trick and Track.
Rococo is an elaborate style of design and the name describes the painstaking effort that has gone into this project. Tick, Trick and Track are the German names for the cartoon ducks known to English speakers as Huey, Dewey and Louie.
Collators are similar to validators in the relay chain. These nodes build the blocks that will eventually be included by the relay chain for a parachain.
To run a Rococo collator you will need to compile the following binary:
cargo build --release -p rococo-collator
Once the executable is built, launch collators for each parachain (repeat once each for chain
tick, trick, track):
./target/release/rococo-collator --chain $CHAIN --validator
The parachains of Rococo all use the same runtime code. The only difference between them is the parachain ID used for registration with the relay chain:
- Tick: 100
- Trick: 110
- Track: 120
The network uses horizontal message passing (HRMP) to enable communication between parachains and the relay chain and, in turn, between parachains. This means that every message is sent to the relay chain, and from the relay chain to its destination parachain.