Bot protection for Polkadot, built from inside Prosopo’s team.
- 9 months embedded in Prosopo’s team, January to September 2022
- 1 Bushido developer across smart contracts, a Substrate node, frontend and backend
What did Bushido do for Prosopo?
Prosopo is a low-trust human verification system that lets Polkadot dapps detect and block bots without relying on a centralised third party. After Prosopo won a Web3 Foundation grant, a Bushido developer joined its team from January to September 2022 to add capacity: smart contracts in Rust with ink!, a Substrate validator node for the parachain that verifies captchas, and frontend and backend work with Polkadot.js, Node.js, MongoDB and Docker.
We build products,
not just tech.
Developer Tools, Web3, Blockchain
January – September 2022
1 developer, embedded in Prosopo’s team
Smart contract development in Rust
Substrate node development
Frontend and backend development
Rust, ink!, Substrate, Polkadot.js, Node.js, MongoDB, Docker
The starting point
Prosopo set out to put human verification on the blockchain: a captcha that Polkadot dapp operators can use to block bots with minimal trust assumptions, instead of handing their users to a centralised third party.
In early 2022 Prosopo won a Web3 Foundation grant to build it. With the grant came the work, and the team needed more hands — someone who could move between Rust smart contracts, a Substrate chain and the JavaScript around them.
What we did
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Joined the team, not a handover.
One Bushido developer worked inside Prosopo’s team for nine months, so the extra capacity went into Prosopo’s own work and process rather than a separate workstream to hand back.
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Built on the core: smart contracts in Rust.
The heart of Prosopo is a set of smart contracts written in Rust with ink!, the Rust smart contract language for Substrate chains.
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Worked on the chain itself.
Development of a Substrate node that serves as a validator in Prosopo’s own parachain, the chain that verifies the captchas.
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Carried it through to the frontend and backend.
JavaScript with Polkadot.js and Node.js, MongoDB for data and Docker for running it: the layer that connects the contracts and the node to the dapps they protect.
Frontend to smart contracts, JavaScript to Rust, dapp to parachain: the kind of role where a builder has to be at home in every layer at once.
Questions people ask about Prosopo.
Does Bushido embed developers in other teams?
Yes. For Prosopo, one Bushido developer joined the team from January to September 2022 and worked across Rust smart contracts, a Substrate node, and the frontend and backend, inside Prosopo’s own process.
What is Prosopo?
A low-trust human verification system for the Polkadot ecosystem. Dapps use it to detect and block activity generated by bots without relying on a centralised third party. It is backed by a Web3 Foundation grant.
Which technologies did the work cover?
Rust and ink! for the smart contracts, Substrate for the validator node, and Polkadot.js, Node.js, MongoDB and Docker for the frontend and backend.
Yours is next.
Same team, sharper tools. Tell us where you are and we will tell you what it takes — scope, shape and a timeline we would actually hold ourselves to — on a 30-minute call with an engineer.