Common concepts

SCALE

Substrate uses a lightweight and efficient encoding and decoding program to optimize how data is sent and received over the network. The program used to serialize and deserialize data is called the SCALE codec, with SCALE being an acronym for Simple Concatenated Aggregate Little-Endian.

This library utilizes py-scale-codec for encoding and decoding SCALE, see this overview for more information how to encode data from Python.

SS58 address formatting

SS58 is a simple address format designed for Substrate based chains. For more information about its specification see the Substrate documentation about SS58

Extrinsics

Extrinsics within Substrate are basically signed transactions, a vehicle to execute a call function within the Substrate runtime, originated from outside the runtime. More information about extrinsics on Substrate docs. For more information on which call functions are available in existing Substrate implementations, refer to the PySubstrate Metadata Docs