The Substrate Builders Program is designed to support users by connecting them with Parity’s extensive resources, which should help with taking their Substrate project to the next level.
As explained by its creators, the Substrate Builders Program aims to identify, support, and mentor current and new (potential) Substrate-related initiatives. If you happen to be a “visionary” builder who is considering or currently working on a project in the Substrate ecosystem, the Builders Program organizers would be interested in talking to you.
As noted by its developers, the program is divided into three different tracks.
Different Tracks for Specific Goals, Use-Cases
To start with, there is the Chains Track, which is intended for teams that are creating “impactful chains.” For instance, this could be independent chains, parachains, and parathreads. Then, there is the Infrastructure Track, which is intended for those that are working on Substrate/Polkadot-related infrastructure. For example, this may include bridges, user interfaces (UIs), special tooling, smart contract support, validator infrastructure, and potentially other applications.
Finally, then there’s the Application Track, which is meant for those that are creating applications on top of the Substrate-based chains. This can include areas such as decentralized finance (DeFi), governance, identity, and anything that hasn’t been possible before due to the lack of a truly interoperable ecosystem.
As explained by its creators, the Builders program entails receiving Parity’s support in a “systematic” manner, including “comprehensive” assistance and advice in the areas of technical support. This may include category-specific chat support with various other program members of the same category and “category-expert” engineers to collaborate and ask meaningful questions.
In addition, there are regular office hours available with the program’s technical support lead to give and obtain feedback and answer questions. There’s also the option to launch support with materials, calls and more to make sure your mainnet launch goes as planned. Furthermore, there are regular individual check-ins to make sure everyone is on track.
Dedicated Community Support
Like most other cryptocurrency-focused support programs, there’s a lot of community support that is available. For instance, there’s collaboration on events, meetups, and webinars. There’s also collaboration on milestone announcements, along with guidance on community building, as well as community funding opportunities.
The program may provide support in assisting your initiative with navigating the Polkadot Network Treasury and Web3 Foundation Grant application processes.
In addition to these services, there is ecosystem support. There are introductions to relevant blockchain ecosystem participants (for instance, clients, users, partners, etc.).
Subsocial Selected to Participate in Substrate Builders Program
Subsocial is an open platform chosen by Parity to participate in the Substrate Builders program. It enables users to deploy their own decentralized censorship-resistant social networks and marketplaces. Subsocial aims to assist users with developing decentralized versions of widely-used platforms like Medium, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Discourse, Patreon, OnlyFans, etc.
Subsocial’s development team claims that they plan to enable users to “truly be free online,” and to capture the “full value of their work.” All users of other social networking websites may offer value to the network, however, they’re rarely rewarded for their contributions.
For instance, most Twitter users don’t get financial benefits from contributing content. By hosting their content “exclusively” on Subsocial, creators should get the real worth of their creations through tips, subscriptions, etc. There is no intermediary or third-party to take a percentage of commission of the revenue. There’s also nobody harvesting users’ data, or using content algorithms to control what users are viewing in an attempt to influence their emotions or actions.
Subsocial software aims to leverage the Substrate blockchain framework and IPFS for supporting decentralized file storage. This data storage approach enables personalized news feed and notifications, “transparent” reputation, full-text searching, rich content formats, all without having to sacrifice SEO (search engine optimization).
By using Substrate, Subsocial is able to connect to the Polkadot and Kusama networks.
Polkadot is described as a next-gen blockchain or distributed ledger tech (DLT) protocol that unites a diverse network of “purpose-built” blockchains, enabling them to interoperate in a seamless manner and at scale. Polkadot will offer cross-chain interaction and a shared security model upon which Subsocial will be able to scale while remaining adequately secure. According to its creators, Subsocial is social media “unbounded.”
As noted by its development team, Subsocial was introduced back in 2019 after realizing the requirement for a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistant social networking platform.
Recent updates in terms of decentralization and the advancement of blockchain or DLT, like Substrate and IPFS, have made these developments possible. The project’s founder, Alex, began working on it as somewhat of a side project, before moving into a full-time role and forming the DappForce team to help bring the dream to reality
It’s worth noting that SubSocial is the recipient of the technical grants from Web3 Foundation. It has managed to deliver on key milestones promised in the grant applications. It’s reportedly one of the first 17 initiatives that have been chosen by Parity to take part in the Substrate Builders Program.
In 2020, the team introduced their betanet which is fully operational and has been “running smoothly for months.” The SubSocial team has also introduced their web dApp just a month after the betanet. Additionally, they have launched Sub.ID in August 2021, which is a tool for users to view their complete Substrate portfolio in one place, with crowdloan contribution information and NFTs.
The Subsocial team reports having more than 12,000 accounts with balances on the betanet chain.
