You probably can’t call it BUIDL when you don’t deploy a contract.
Every airdrop enthusiast will enter the chain and application as a user, but from the perspective of the chain, users have a certain level of boundaries, among which, for the chain, the application developer is the most valuable.
Application developers develop dApps that can attract users to use, gas will be generated in the process of use, developers will deploy contracts on the chain, will actively attract users to operate the chain, and the value of the chain itself will increase infinitely.
Therefore, it can be said that having development capabilities or simple development knowledge is a better way to increase the chances of obtaining airdrops, or more precisely, becoming a real builder on the chain.
In this article, we will describe in detail the simple development knowledge required by a user who likes to experience chain operations. This article will lead ordinary users into the theoretical period of development experience for novices, and if you want to enter the practical period, you can continue to study other in-depth knowledge.
Build a framework for understanding blockchain theory
In our previous article “How to Disassemble New and Old Projects in the World with Technical Logic?”, we explained the attribute definition of blockchain, blockchain is not just a general ledger, and all public chains that exist today are designed for the growth of surface applications.
Therefore, the development knowledge of understanding the chain is consistent with the development and application of the Internet itself, in terms of architectural understanding, only the back-end has become the chain, and the original data state in the database has become the data state on the chain.
For example, we purchase two servers, one deploys the front-end, and the other deploys the back-end, buys a website, configures the website and the front-end development part, and then develops the back-end to manage the data, and the interactive data of the website will enter the back-end when it is used, and the front-end user needs to obtain a feedback data when the operation is carried out, and then the data status in the database is accessed。
Based on such a complex process, in traditional applications, users basically do not feel the backend, but on the blockchain, the front-end and back-end can be clearly felt.
The backend of a dApp turns the servers and databases used by Internet application development into a total state on the chain and on the chain.
During development, the back-end chain exposes a remote call interface RPC, through which all developers and applications operate.
That’s why when using MetaMask to experience different dApps, you need to add different networks to the dApp, and the url represents the access point of the rpc when adding the network.
In other network designs, there is also a way to upgrade the dApp again, if a chain only uses one rpc, then when a lot of interaction is required, the access process will be congested before the task is submitted to the chain.
At this time, if it is possible to build their own RPC, the application side will have a greater advantage, but at present, in the field of public chains, with the current design of pos, there are not many dApps that operate in this way.
At this point, we can basically figure out that when we interact with the chain for development actions, we will need a wallet and an RPC port.
An important development tool
After getting the entrance, the next step is how to operate on the chain.
Ethereum is known as the world computer, and it can run all kinds of self-executing smart contracts, and this process is done by deploying contracts to the network and being executed by the EVM.
The term virtual machine VM is a word that must be spoken in the cloud services industry, and we can think of the computing device in the Ethereum network as a huge computing storage area, that is, a virtual machine, which allows smart contracts to run and allow task instructions to be executed.
Then smart contracts become the key, and the core link of experience developers is smart contracts.
The deployment of smart contracts is divided into, the first to write code, the second to compile, and the third to deploy, and the contract functions can be directly called after the deployment is completed.
Ethereum has fixed tools, and these tools have been made so simple that once you understand the whole process, you can try it out just by looking closely.
Remix, Hardhat, and OpenZeppelin are some of the most simple and open tools at present, and in addition to these open source tools, there are also tools such as Thirdweb that can assist in development and simplify some processes.
Start with the testnet experience of each network
Recently, we have experienced the testnets of public chains such as Berachain, Taiko, and Shardeum. You can learn about the development knowledge from the experience process of these chains.
First of all, I’m a regular user, and I use MetaMask operations to interact with the network. The first step is to add the testnet to MetaMask and obtain the tokens in the testnet, the testnet tokens are collected from the testnet faucet, the number is limited, and the claim process is publicized in the official documents of the three projects, the test tokens of these three chains are Bera, ETH, and SHM.
Among them, it can be found that Berachain and Shardeum are both L1 and use their own native tokens, while Taiko is L2, and the goal of existence is to expand Ethereum, so ETH is used, and because Ethereum has a public testnet, Taiko also used the testnet of Ethereum itself to conduct some functional tests.
After getting the experience token from the faucet of the three chains, the next step is to try how to use the development tools to deploy the contract to the chain.
So there will be three steps, find the contract, modify the contract, and complete the contract deployment in the IDE.
In the documentation pages of each of the three projects, it will be clear which tools will be supported for corresponding contract deployment. After review, all three projects support the use of Remix for deployment, so we will use Remix for this process.
Remix is an online editable environment that is very convenient and does not require the use of other complex tools such as SDKs or terminals, but the simple process in this article is only a one-time deployment, and other tools are required to modify the contract and call the test.
1. How to find the contract to deploy
On OpenZeppelin, there is a modular display of several commonly used token issuance contracts, where we can directly select the function and jump directly to Remix.
Here’s the splash page:
2. Make simple modifications to the contract code
Then I set up the contract to issue the token, use the full name of Wyz Research, the abbreviation of Wyz, and select the pre-issuance in the feature, and specified the ownership of the contract. Through these operations, the contract code on the right has the builder shown in the first red box, and the pre-issued token also has an address point.
2. Make simple modifications to the contract code
Then I set up the contract to issue the token, use the full name of Wyz Research, the abbreviation of Wyz, and select the pre-issuance in the feature, and specified the ownership of the contract. Through these operations, the contract code on the right has the builder shown in the first red box, and the pre-issued token also has an address point.
3. How to deploy the contract
Next, click Open in Remix in the upper right corner, and we can start editing in the Remix interface
Before you start editing in the Remix interface, please adjust the network and wallet addresses in MetaMask correctly.
After entering the page, we need to modify the above two corresponding addresses, and I use the wallet address to replace them. It is shown below:
Then click Auto complie on the left, that is, automatic compilation, if there is no automatic compilation, you need to click the blue button on the left. When a green tick appears on the far left, you can do it. Then click the green tick button on the left to enter the deployment page.
In the case that the wallet has been modified correctly, click on the account section in the upper left corner, this position represents the account that pays for gas, and the following position represents the deployment address, after selection, it will be displayed as follows:
Click Deploy, and MetaMask will pop up to pay the gas fee for this operation.
During the deployment of the contract, the contract pending will be displayed on the bottom side of the remix
After the contract is successfully deployed, the transaction will be displayed on the lower side.
4. Query the transaction in the browser
After the deployment is completed, when you click the button in the wallet to enter the browser to view the transaction, you can find that we have just completed the action of creating a contract, and during the execution of the contract, the corresponding token was sent to one of the tokens.
When I click on the address again, I will find that I have mint 1000 W tokens in the address. However, it seems that due to the testnet browser, the token name is not displayed, which is still to be verified.
This deployment is the use of Shardeum, if deployed on Berachain, Taiko uses the same process, only need to adjust the corresponding network in the wallet. An online IDE such as Remix provides a simple entry point for network operations.
Carrying out certain development operations on the chain is the simplest construction attempt for non-application users, you can try to use the contract to issue some assets, or fork the code of other dApps, and the contracts of each dApp on the chain are interacted with in a combination of ways, for example, the swap of Uniswap we see is one contract, and the one that provides LP is another contract.
Compared with Dex, other Defi and Gamefi contracts are more complex. While the development process is complex and lengthy, for enthusiasts, understanding how it works can help chains and applications build more.