Cumulus tool for Substrate and GRANDPA in-depth – 04. [Sofia Polkadot]

1 min read·Posted Apr 1, 2019 underEvents &Meet-ups

Updated on Aug 14, 2019

Cover Image for Cumulus tool for Substrate and GRANDPA in-depth – 04. [Sofia Polkadot]

Polkadot Sofia Meetup 4 – Cumulus, Substrate and Grandpa

The time has come for our fourth Polkadot Sofia Meetup. This time the meetup took place in a new cozy venue – Networking Premium Coworking, and hopefully the recording will be better.

We looked over Cumulus – a tool set for easier development of parachains with Substrate.

It’s easy to write blockchains using Substrate, and the overhead of writing parachains’ distribution, p2p, database, and synchronization layers is generally high and should be reusable. This project aims to make it easy to write parachains for Polkadot by leveraging the power of Substrate.
cumulus github

In order for us to understand what cumulus actually is about we needed to dive deep into Substrate and Polkadot.

So we looked over what Substrate framework is build for and what are its main features.

Polkadot’s GRANDPA consensus is a very interesting and quite adaptive algorithm. Milen had prepared a presentation about it, explaining its roots.

GRANDPA Protocol – [source: https://github.com/w3f/consensus/blob/master/pdf/grandpa.pdf]

You can see the whole video from the meetup here:

Resources

Have a project in mind?

Let's talk about what you're building.

About the author

Milen

Milen Radkov has experience building and delivering successful complex software systems and projects for both big enterprises and small startups. Being actively developing across different blockchain protocols, platforms and projects for the past 5 years, he has gained extensive experience in blockchain development, architectures, consensus algorithms and token economics. Milen is a well-known figure in the blockchain space.

More Stories

The zkEVM Race: Ethereum’s Most Difficult Engineering Problem

Milen Radkov

·Feb 17, 2026

Every blockchain faces the same uncomfortable question eventually: what happens when more people want to use it than it can handle? For Ethereum, that question stopped being theoretical years ago. At peak congestion, a simple token swap can cost more in gas fees than the tokens themselves are worth. The network processes roughly 15 transactions […]

The Hidden Threats in Code Review Requests: A Cautionary Tale for Developers

Milen Radkov

·Jan 20, 2025

As developers, we’re often approached to troubleshoot or optimize projects. While most requests are legitimate, sometimes they conceal malicious intent. Recently, we’ve been encountering situations that underscore the importance of vigilance in our field. Here’s a detailed account of what happened in one of the requests, how we uncovered the threat, and the lessons we […]