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General Resources

Welcome

Here you will find resources to help facilitate your learning about Polkadot, the Polkadot Host, and Gossamer. Don't worry if you are unfamiliar with these terms, the resources listed here assume no prior knowledge about them. That being said, it would be helpful to have a basic understanding of existing blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Polkadot

To start, it would be extremely beneficial to have an understanding of the Polkadot Network. For a high-level introduction to Polkadot, check out the lightpaper. To understand the motivation behind Polkadot's creation and what makes it unique, check out this great blog post A brief summary of everything Substrate and Polkadot. While reading, it would be helpful to note that Substrate and Gossamer are both implementations of the Polkadot Host.

Additional Resources

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Block explorers

Polkadot Host

[Please Note: The "Polkadot Host" was formerly known as the "Polkadot Runtime Environment"]

The Polkadot Host plays two important roles within the Polkadot ecosystem.

  • The Polkadot Host implements the fundamental components for a blockchain, ie networking and consensus. These components are not expected to change, and as such, they host part of the blockchain that is expected to change, the Runtime. For more details, check out Polkadot Host.

  • The Polkadot Host is a blockchain development framework, similar to how React and Angular are web development frameworks, but rather than helping developers build web applications, implementations of the Polkadot Host help developers build blockchains.

As mentioned above, both Substrate and Gossamer are implementations of the Polkadot Host. If you're interested in the nitty-gritty technical details, check out the Polkadot Host specification.

Gossamer

Gossamer is an implementation of the Polkadot Host in Go. To learn more about Gossamer, we recommend the following resources:

Additional Resources

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Substrate

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Web3 Foundation

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