Custom Substrate runtimes and Polkadot parachains built in Rust, with forkless upgrades, ink! smart contracts, XCM messaging, and shared security from the relay chain.
Substrate, now shipped as the Polkadot SDK, is a framework for building blockchains where the runtime is compiled to WebAssembly and stored on the chain itself. That single design decision is why Substrate chains can upgrade their own logic through governance, without every validator manually coordinating a hard fork, and it is why serious protocol teams keep choosing it.
We build both standalone Substrate chains and Polkadot parachains: FRAME pallets that encode your domain logic, staking and governance configuration, ink! or EVM contract layers, XCM channels to the rest of the ecosystem, and the collator infrastructure that keeps the whole thing producing blocks.
#4 902 118
6s block · GRANDPA finalized · 12 XCM messages
#4 902 117
Runtime spec_version 1402 enacted
#4 902 116
Collator rotation · 84 extrinsics
From a first pallet to a parachain running on coretime with production collators.
Domain logic implemented as FRAME pallets: the Substrate equivalent of building your rules into the chain instead of into a contract.
End-to-end parachain delivery: runtime, collators, coretime, and the registration process on Polkadot or Kusama.
A contract layer on top of your chain, whether your developers write Rust or already have a Solidity codebase.
Connecting your chain to the rest of the ecosystem: asset transfers, remote calls, and cross-chain application flows.
The part teams underestimate: changing a live chain’s logic and storage layout without corrupting state.
The application layer around your chain: Polkadot.js integration, front ends, indexers, and wallet support.
The Polkadot SDK toolchain, plus the client and operations layer a live parachain needs around it.
The runtime framework, its pallet system, and the relay chain it plugs into.
Runtime logic in Rust, contracts in ink! or Solidity through Frontier.
Everything between your parachain and the people using it.
Collator infrastructure, telemetry, and release pipelines for runtime upgrades.
Working with something else? Our teams pick up new tools quickly. Tell us about your stack.
The details that decide whether a Substrate chain is maintainable two years in.
Every extrinsic benchmarked on reference hardware, so block limits hold and fees track actual computation instead of guesswork.
Migrations written with versioned storage and validated with try-runtime against live chain state before they are ever enacted.
Origin checks, arithmetic safety, weight abuse, and unbounded iteration reviewed as standard, since these are the failure modes specific to FRAME.
OpenGov tracks, councils, and referenda configured so upgrades are actually executable without concentrating control.
Redundant collators, telemetry, and alerting, because a parachain that stops producing blocks stops earning its coretime.
Cross-chain configuration tested on Rococo and Kusama first, since a misconfigured XCM channel can strand assets permanently.
Where the runtime-upgrade model and shared security pay for themselves.
Product-specific chains that inherit Polkadot security instead of bootstrapping a validator set from scratch.
Identity, KYC, and transfer restrictions enforced in the runtime rather than bolted on in a contract.
Native asset issuance with protocol-level compliance rules and cross-chain distribution over XCM.
Bridges and messaging hubs that connect Polkadot to Ethereum, Cosmos, and other external ecosystems.
From runtime specification to a parachain producing blocks on coretime.
We decide what belongs in the runtime and what belongs in contracts, then specify the pallet set, storage layout, consensus configuration, and whether you launch standalone or as a parachain.
Custom pallets built in Rust with unit tests, mock runtimes, and integration tests from the first sprint, plus a local devnet your team can run and inspect.
ink! or EVM contract layers added where they fit, alongside Polkadot.js client integration, indexers, and the dApp surfaces your users will actually touch.
Weight benchmarking on reference hardware, try-runtime validation, fuzzing of extrinsic inputs, and review against the known FRAME security pitfalls.
Deployment to Rococo or Kusama with real collators and XCM channels, an external audit of the runtime, and remediation before mainnet registration.
Coretime acquisition, parachain registration, collator operations, and the ongoing cycle of governance-driven runtime upgrades that follows.
Common questions about Substrate, Polkadot, and parachain delivery.
A parachain inherits Polkadot’s validator set, so you get strong security and XCM connectivity on day one without recruiting validators, at the cost of coretime and less control over block production. A standalone Substrate chain, sometimes called a solochain, gives you complete sovereignty and no coretime cost, but you have to bootstrap and maintain your own validator set and your own security budget. We size both against your roadmap before committing.
Polkadot has moved from two-year slot auctions to Agile Coretime: you buy blockspace as bulk or on-demand coretime, in much shorter increments, and renew it. That removed the multi-million-DOT crowdloan barrier that used to define parachain launches, and it means a project can start with on-demand coretime and scale up as usage grows. We handle acquisition and renewal as part of launch operations.
Yes, through the Frontier pallet, which gives a Substrate chain a full EVM environment with Ethereum RPC compatibility. Existing contracts deploy largely unchanged and MetaMask, Hardhat, and Foundry work against the chain. Where performance or protocol-level behaviour matters, we move that logic into a native pallet instead and keep the EVM for the rest.
ink! is Substrate’s Rust-based smart contract language, compiled to Wasm and executed by the contracts pallet. Use ink! when logic should be permissionless, deployable by third parties, or changed without a runtime upgrade. Use a pallet when the logic is core to your chain, needs to run at protocol speed, or should not be deployable by anyone but you. Most chains we build end up with both.
The upgrade mechanism itself is well-proven; the risk is in storage migrations. We treat those as first-class code: versioned storage, migration handlers with pre- and post-upgrade checks, and try-runtime dry runs against a snapshot of live chain state before anything reaches governance. Upgrades then go through your normal referendum process with a rollback plan documented.
A chain built mostly from standard FRAME pallets with light customisation is typically 3 to 5 months to testnet. A parachain with substantial custom pallets, XCM integration, an audit, and a coordinated mainnet launch usually runs 7 to 12 months. We deliver a running devnet in the first weeks either way.
Most protocols end up spanning more than one ecosystem. We work across all of them.
Tell us what your runtime has to do and we will come back with a pallet architecture, a parachain-versus-solochain recommendation, and a delivery timeline.