Welcome!
Welcome to Gear’s documentation portal. This is the central source of information for everyone who is looking for general information about Gear. Here you will find guides and developer's documentation that will enable you to dive deeper into developing smart contracts on the Gear Protocol.
Our Wiki outlines foundational information required, general technology overviews and key advantages of Gear’s technology, including how to implement and run your smart contracts and how to get started with the Gear node setup, while also providing full API details and examples.
All code, libraries, and tools are available on Github with a permissive Apache-2.0 license. Feel free to use the tools and libraries, log issues as you find them, or create pull requests for your bug-bears or features.
As our project is developing and growing, contributions are more than welcome!
What is the Gear Protocol?
The Gear Protocol is a Substrate-based smart-contract platform that enables anyone to develop and run a dApp in a matter of minutes. The Gear Protocol is the most developer-friendly way to implement smart contracts with arbitrary logic and of any complexity. Gear smart-contracts run as WebAssembly programs so they can be compiled from many popular programming languages, such as Rust, C, C++ and many more.
The protocol ensures very minimal, intuitive and sufficient APIs for implementing programs and running them on multiple networks without having to rewrite them. From a technological point of view, the Gear Protocol is distinguished by fundamentally new features that enable you to create asynchronous programs with a completely new and previously unattainable user experience, namely - the Actor model for communication, the persistent memory concept and WebAssembly execution environment. The protocol dictates what actors should look like as communicating entities.
The Gear Protocol will assist with the transition to mass use of Web3 technologies by enabling the running of innovative dApps, microservices, middleware and open APIs.
What is the Gear Network?
The Gear Protocol provides the most cost-effective way to run smart contracts. Powered by the Gear Protocol, Gear Networks can act as standalone L1 networks, as well as become a parachain in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem too. By deploying on Gear Protocol, developers can fully leverage the benefits offered by Gear.
Vara Network is the first stand-alone layer-1 decentralized network built and running on top of Gear Protocol.
How to engage with the Gear community
GitHub
Instructions and other development-focused conversation is found on our GitHub.
Discord
General information and non-technical conversation is found on our Discord server.
Twitter
Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @gear_techs
Telegram
Join Gear's official Telegram channel: @gear_tech
Medium
Get smart with our regular articles on Medium.