The purpose of this document is to help you with launching your existing dapp on Avalanche. It contains a series of resources designed to help you get the basics of Avalanche Platform and how it works, show how to connect to the network, how to use your existing tools and environments in developing and deploying on Avalanche, as well as some common pitfalls you need to consider when running your dapp on Avalanche.
Avalanche is a network of networks. It means that it is not a single chain running a single, uniform type of blocks. It contains multiple subnets, each running one of more heterogeneous chains. But, to run an Ethereum dapp on a low-fee, fast network with instant finality, we don't need to concern ourselves with that right now. Using the link above you can find out more if you wish, but all you need to know right now is that one of the chains running on Avalanche Primary Network is the C-Chain (contract chain).
C-Chain runs a fork of go-ethereum called coreth that has the networking and consensus portions replaced with Avalanche equivalents. What's left is the Ethereum VM, which runs Solidity smart contracts and manages data structures and blocks on the chain. As a result, you get a blockchain that can run all the Solidity smart contracts from Ethereum, but with much greater transaction bandwidth and instant finality that Avalanche's revolutionary consensus enables.
Coreth is loaded as a plugin into AvalancheGo, the client node application used to run Avalanche network.
As far as your dapp is concerned, it will be running the same as on Ethereum, just quicker and cheaper. Let's find out how.
C-Chain exposes the same API as go-ethereum, so you can use all the familiar APIs that are available on Ethereum for interaction with the platform.
There are multiple ways of working with the C-Chain.
You can access C-Chain through MetaMask, by defining a custom network. Go to MetaMask, log in, click the network dropdown, and select 'Custom RPC'. Data for Avalanche is as follows.
- Network Name: Avalanche Mainnet C-Chain
- New RPC URL: https://api.avax.network/ext/bc/C/rpc
- ChainID:
43114 - Symbol:
AVAX - Explorer: https://cchain.explorer.avax.network/
- Network Name: Avalanche FUJI C-Chain
- New RPC URL: https://api.avax-test.network/ext/bc/C/rpc
- ChainID:
43113 - Symbol:
AVAX - Explorer: https://cchain.explorer.avax-test.network
In your application's web interface, you can add Avalanche programmatically so your users don't have to enter the network data manually. To see the adding custom network flow in action, check out Pangolin DEX.
Instead of proxying network operations through MetaMask, you can use the public API, which consists of a number of AvalancheGo nodes behind a load balancer.
The C-Chain API endpoint is https://api.avax.network/ext/bc/C/rpc for the mainnet and https://api.avax-test.network/ext/bc/C/rpc for the testnet.
For more information, refer to the documentation.
If you don't want your dapp to depend on a centralized service you don't control, you can run your own node and access the network that way. Running your own node also avoids potential issues with public API congestion and rate-limiting.
For development purposes, here is a tutorial for downloading, building, and installation of AvalancheGo. If you're going to run a production node on a Linux machine, here is a tutorial that shows how to use the installer script to quickly and easily install the node as a systemd service. Script also handles node upgrading. If you want to run a node in a docker container, there are build scripts in the AvalancheGo repo for various Docker configs.
If you need a private test network to test your dapp, Avash is a shell client for launching local Avalanche networks, similar to Ganache on Ethereum.
Avash uses Lua as a scripting language for orchestrating local networks. You can find a tutorial for Avash here.
Being an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, all of the usual Ethereum developer tools and environments can be used to develop and deploy dapps for Avalanche's C-Chain.
Here is a tutorial for using Remix to deploy smart contracts on Avalanche. It relies on MetaMask for access to Avalanche network.
You can also use Truffle to test and deploy smart contracts on Avalanche. Find out how in this tutorial.
Hardhat is the newest development and testing environment for Solidity smart contracts, and the one our developers use the most. Due to its superb testing support, it is the recommended way of developing for Avalanche.
Here is a quickstart repository that our developers use to start new projects. It is already configured for Avalanche so no additional setup is required.
An essential part of the smart contract development environment is the explorer, which indexes and serves blockchain data. Mainnet C-Chain explorer is available at https://cchain.explorer.avax.network/ and testnet explorer at https://cchain.explorer.avax-test.network. Besides the web interface, it also exposes the standard Ethereum JSON RPC API.
For development purposes, you will need test tokens. Avalanche has a Faucet that drips test tokens to the address of your choice. Paste your C-Chain address there.
If you need, you can also run a faucet locally, but building it from the repository.
Smart contract verification provides transparency for users interacting with smart contracts by publishing the source code, allowing everyone to attest that it really does what it claims to do. You can verify your smart contracts using the C-Chain explorer. The procedure is simple:
- navigate to your published contract address on the explorer
- on the
codetab selectverify & publish - copy and paste the flattened source code and enter all the build parameters exactly as they are on the published contract
- click
verify & publish
If successful, the code tab will now have a green checkmark, and your users will be able to verify the contents of your contract. This is a strong positive signal that your users can trust your contracts, and it is strongly recommended for all production contracts.
Due to the nature of distributed apps, it is very hard to fix bugs once the application is deployed. Because of that, making sure your app is running correctly and securely before deployment is of great importance. Contract security reviews are done by specialized companies and services. They can be very expensive, which might be out of reach for single developers and startups. But, there are also automated services and programs that are free to use.
Most popular are:
We highly recommend using at least one of them if professional contract security review is not possible. A more comprehensive look into secure development practices can be found here.
Avalanche Platform's C-Chain is EVM-compatible, but it is not identical. There are some differences you need to be aware of, otherwise, you may create subtle bugs or inconsistencies in how your dapps behave.
Here are the main differences you should be aware of.
It is customary on Ethereum to use block height progress as a proxy for time. You should not do that on Avalanche. Chains on Avalanche are quiescent, meaning that if there is no activity, there are no blocks produced. The opposite is also true, if there is a great amount of activity, blocks are produced very fast. Because of that, you should not measure the passage of time by the number of blocks that are produced. The results will not be accurate, and your contract may be manipulated by third parties.
Instead of block rate, you should measure time simply by reading the timestamp attribute of the produced blocks. Timestamps are guaranteed to be monotonically increasing and to be within 30 seconds of the real time.
On Ethereum, the blockchain can be reorganized and blocks can be orphaned, so you cannot rely on the fact that a block has been accepted until it is several blocks further from the tip (usually, it is presumed that blocks 6 places deep are safe). That is not the case on Avalanche. Blocks are either accepted or rejected within a second or two. And once the block has been accepted, it is final, and cannot be replaced, dropped, or modified. So the concept of 'number of confirmations' on Avalanche is not used. As soon as a block is accepted and available in the explorer, it is final.
Gas on Avalanche is burned. Validators don't keep the gas for themselves (they get rewarded for staking), so the dynamics of 'gas wars' where higher-priced transactions are included first is non-existent. Therefore, there is never a need to put a higher gas price on your transactions. You'll only be burning gas in vain.
By default, coreth is configured in a way that is optimal for publicly running nodes used as validators. For development or dapps, you may want to change some defaults to settings more appropriate for your usage. This is done through node's command-line options. Command-line options for coreth are listed here, along with their default values.
You can supply options on the command line, or use the config file, which can be easier to work with when a lot of custom options are configured. Use —config-file=config.json option, and then provide a complete configuration in the config.json file, for example:
{
"coreth-config": {
"snowman-api-enabled": false,
"coreth-admin-api-enabled": false,
"net-api-enabled": true,
"eth-api-enabled": true,
"personal-api-enabled": false,
"tx-pool-api-enabled": true,
"debug-api-enabled": true,
"web3-api-enabled": true,
"local-txs-enabled": true
}
}If you're using the eth_newFilter API method on the public API server, it may not behave as you expect because the public API is actually several nodes behind a load balancer. If you make an eth_newFilter call, subsequent calls to eth_getFilterChanges may not end up on the same node as the first call, and you will end up with undefined results.
If you need the log filtering functionality, you should use a websocket connection, which ensures that your client is always talking to the same node behind the load balancer. Alternatively, you can use eth_getLogs, or run your own node and make API calls to it.
Using this tutorial you should be able to quickly get up to speed on Avalanche, deploy, and test your dapps. If you have questions, problems, or just want to chat with us, you can reach us on our public Discord server. We'd love to hear from you and find out what you're building on Avalanche!