• ABEL Blockchain is based on Substrate frame.
• Substrate is powered by best-in-class cryptographic research and comes with peer-to-peer networking, consensus mechanisms, and much more.
• It saves us development time for the basic part, so we have more time to develop business modules.

A blockchain node is an application that allows users to participate in a blockchain network. Substrate-based blockchain nodes expose a number of capabilities:

• Networking: Substrate nodes use the libp2p networking stack to allow the nodes in the network to communicate with one another.
• Consensus: Blockchains must have a way to come to consensus on the state of the network. Substrate makes it possible to supply custom consensus engines and also ships with several consensus mechanisms that have been built on top of Web3 Foundation research.
• RPC Server: A remote procedure call (RPC) server is used to interact with Substrate nodes.

There are several files in the node directory - take special note of the following:

• chain_spec.rs: A chain specification is a source code file that defines a Substrate chain's initial (genesis) state. Chain specifications are useful for development and testing, and critical when architecting the launch of a production chain. Take note of the development_config and testnet_genesis functions, which are used to define the genesis state for the local development chain configuration. These functions identify some well-known accounts and use them to configure the blockchain's initial state.
• service.rs: This file defines the node implementation. Take note of the libraries that this file imports and the names of the functions it invokes. In particular, there are references to consensus-related topics, such as the longest chain rule, the Aura block authoring mechanism and the GRANDPA finality gadget.

After the node has been built, refer to the embedded documentation to learn more about the capabilities and configuration parameters that it exposes:

./target/release/node-template --help

This template includes the minimum required components to start a PoS testnet, inspired by substrate-node-template.

• Consensus related pallets: Babe & GRANDPA
• Staking related pallets: staking, session, authorship, im-online, offences, utility
• Governance related pallets: collective, membership, elections-phragmen, democracy, treasure