I was reading about ink smart contracts and was curious is it possible to make bridge using ink, as there is already parity-common-bridges present. It would be very helpful if someone knows about this or can point to any documentation for the same.
1 Answer
I'm not sure if I understand correctly what you mean with "to make bridge using ink!", so I'll try to answer what I guess you mean.
So in the Substrate universe you would build a bridge to another chain as a Substrate runtime module and not as a smart contract. Those are two different things in Substrate. parity-common-bridges
is a collection of Substrate modules (those are called "pallets" in Substrate terminology) to build a bridge.
Substrate has a number of other pallets, one of them is called pallet-contracts
. It's a module that you can add to your Substrate runtime to give it smart contract capabilities. With ink! you can write smart contracts for this pallet-contracts
.
Not every chain needs smart contracts, on Polkadot/Kusama many actually don't have a need for smart contracts because they realize this functionality purely within their Substrate runtime. For example, some chains don't have a need for users to execute programs which make use of the chain business logic (which is one reason why a chain would want to add smart contract capabilities).
I suspect that your questions stems from a confusion that people learning about Substrate often run into: that most things are implemented as a Substrate runtime and not as a smart contract.
There is a great answer to Smart Contracts vs. Runtimes on Substrate here: When should I build a Substrate Runtime Module versus a Substrate Smart Contract?.