Looking for the best chain to build on – Polkadot dev feedback needed

Tech Talk
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I’m comparing several ecosystems for an upcoming DApp and would love insights from Polkadot/Substrate builders.

  • What makes you choose Polkadot (or a specific parachain) for smart-contract work?
  • Which parts of the toolchain—Ink!, Substrate, Polkadot-JS, local nodes, etc.—feel smooth, and which still cause headaches?
  • If you have experience on other chains, where does Polkadot excel or fall short in DX, docs, or community support?

Any quick tips, war stories, or best-practice pointers are greatly appreciated. Thanks for helping me pick the right platform!

What we plan on doing
An on-chain prepaid-credits gateway for usage-based service (e.g., API calls, storage minutes, render time).

  • User story: A customer connects a wallet, pays a fixed fee, and instantly receives a set of prepaid service credits recorded on-chain; the UI updates to show the current credit balance.
  • Business flow: Payments accumulate in the contract’s treasury. When finance staff connect with an authorised wallet, a “Withdraw” action appears, allowing them to sweep the collected funds to the company account.
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If I understand the plan, allowing users to have a one time fee to interact with the dapp in stead of a per transaction fee, we would be super interested to help, we have experience building an alike solution in Polkadot, something that I think is super valuable to further explore.

As for whether Polkadot is the right place to build, Polkadot is the strongest tech in the space, working hard on realising the true web3 vision.

Developer Experience wise, we have a lot to learn and improve. However, we can give you the guidance and support you need and we would be interested to hear where we can improve our tooling and educational resources.

I work at R0GUE, a company that builds Polkadot Developer tooling and is part of the ink! alliance (Polkadot’s native Rust smart contract programming language). We have a lot of experience in building chains and smart contracts in Polkadot.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need help: Telegram: View @go_r0gue

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