Skip to main content

Tool Index

Here, we provide a list of tools available for your development needs. They are sorted by context. If you're actively maintaining a tool that might be useful to other Polkadot, Kusama or Substrate developers, feel free to add it in.

Wallets​

Please see the Wallets page on the official website or the Wallets page on the Wiki for detailed information.

Block Explorers​

  • Polkadot-JS Apps Explorer - Polkadot dashboard block explorer. Supports dozens of other networks, including Kusama, Westend, and other remote or local endpoints. Access via IPFS
  • Subscan - Blockchain explorer for Substrate chains. Repo.
  • 3xpl.com - Fastest ad-free universal block explorer and JSON API with Polkadot support.
  • Blockchair.com - Universal blockchain explorer and search engine with Polkadot support.
  • Statescan.io - Polkadot & Kusama Blockchain explorer.

Blockchain Analytics​

  • Dune Analytics - Community dashboards and analytics
  • DotLake - data visualizations for the Polkadot Ecosystem maintained by Parity
  • Web3go - An open platform for everyone to play with, curate and visualize multi-blockchain data
  • Polkawatch - Polkadot Decentralization Analytics

Network Monitoring & Reporting​

  • Polkadot Telemetry Service - Network information including what nodes are running the chain, what software versions they are running, sync status, and location.
  • Polkabot - Polkadot network monitoring and reporting using Matrix (Riot / Element) chat. Users may create custom bot plugins. Blogpost.
  • Ryabina's Telegram Bot - A Telegram bot for monitoring on-chain events of Substrate chains. GitHub Repository GitHub Repository.
  • Panic - A node monitoring and alert server for validators.
  • OpenWeb3/Guardian - A CLI tool and JS library to monitor on chain states and events.
  • Ocelloids SDK - Typescript SDK for multi-chain monitoring that supports domain-specific logic for different pallets.
  • Cyclops Dashboard - a validator dashboard application that helps Polkadot network validators keep track of all their validators, their staking rewards, and performance.

Clients​

Tools​

  • Substrate - Blockchain development platform written in Rust. The Rust version of the Polkadot Host is being built with Substrate.
  • Substrate Docs - Comprehensive documentation and tutorials for building a blockchain using Substrate.
  • Substrate VSCode plugin (deprecated).
  • Substrate Debug Kit (deprecated) - A collection of debug tools and libraries around substrate chains. Includes tools to calculate NPoS elections offline, disk usage monitoring, test templates against chain state and other pallet-specific helper.
  • POP CLI - An all-in-one tool for Polkadot development.
  • Zombienet - Testing framework for Substrate based blockchains
  • Diener - A tool for easy changing of Polkadot or Substrate dependency versions.
  • Polkadot Launch (deprecated) - A tool to easily launch custom local parachain-enabled Polkadot versions.
  • Fork-off Substrate - Copies the state of an existing chain into your local version and lets you further experiment on it.
  • srtool - A tool for verifying runtime versions against on-chain proposal hashes.
  • sub-bench - A tool to spam your node with transactions for the sake of benchmarking.
  • substrate-devhub-utils - A set of JavaScript utilities making life with Substrate a little easier.
  • sub-flood (archived) - A tool to benchmark Substrate by flooding it with requests.
  • Apillon - A Web3 development platform with a complete toolbox and access to Polkadot’s technology stack.

IDEs​

  • Astar IDE by Chain IDE is a tool for lightning-speed smart contracts and dApp development for Wasm and EVM.
  • Sandox IDE is an integrated development environment (IDE) with tools for building in the Polkadot environment. Currently helpful for creating applications in JS.

UI​

Libraries​

Polkadot-JS API​

The Polkadot-JS API provides various utility functions that are used across all projects in the @polkadot namespace and is split into a number of internal utility packages. The documentation and usage instructions are provided at Polkadot-JS API Documentation.

  • @polkadot/keyring This allows you to create and load accounts in JavaScript. It is helpful for creating wallets or any application that will require the user to write to chain. Examples.
  • @polkadot/util Utility functions like checking if a string is hex-encoded.
  • @polkadot/util-crypto Useful cryptographic utilities for developing with Polkadot.

Alternative Libraries​

The following libraries/SDKs allow for interfacing with a Substrate node in other languages:

CLI Tools​

WASM​

WebAssembly related tools and projects.

  • ink! - An eDSL to write WebAssembly based smart contracts using the Rust programming language.
  • parity-wasm - Low-level WebAssembly format library.
  • wasm-utils - Collection of WebAssembly utilities used in pwasm-ethereum and substrate contract development.
  • wasmi - A WebAssembly interpreter conceived as a component of parity-ethereum (Ethereum-like contracts in Wasm) and Substrate.

RPC and API Tools​

GAME ENGINE SDK​

SCALE Codec​

The SCALE (Simple Concatenated Aggregate Little-Endian) Codec is a lightweight, efficient, binary serialization and deserialization codec.

It is designed for high-performance, copy-free encoding and decoding of data in resource-constrained execution contexts, such as the Substrate runtime. It is not self-describing in any way and assumes the decoding context has all type knowledge about the encoded data.

It is used in almost all communication to/from Substrate nodes, so implementations in different languages exist:

Data Crawling and Conversion​

The following tools help you extract and structure data from a Substrate node.

  • Parity's Substrate Archive - Can be run alongside a Substrate node to archive all blocks, state, and extrinsic data into PostgreSQL database.
  • Subsquid Archives - Generate a GraphQL database from a Substrate chain's data with rich filtering and querying capabilities. The data (events, extrinsics, blocks) for most parachains is readily available though public archive GraphQL endpoints, kept in Squid Archive Registry
  • Polka-store - A tool which scans a Substrate chain and stores balance-relevant transactions in an SQLite database.
  • Substrate-graph - A compact indexer for Substrate based nodes providing a GraphQL interface.