My Solidity Journey through CBDE Certification

I wanted to share a bit about my journey with Solidity and how preparing for the CBDE (Certified Blockchain Developer – Ethereum) exam ended up expanding my perspective, not just within the Ethereum ecosystem, but also how those skills are beginning to translate into the Polkadot world.

The CBDE exam puts a big emphasis on Ethereum fundamentals, Solidity, smart contract design, DApp architecture, security vulnerabilities (like reentrancy and front-running), and development environments like Hardhat and Truffle. While prepping, I wasn’t just studying passively;

I built and deployed small contracts, messed around in Remix, and explored EVM behavior in detail. I used a few community resources for practice, and one that stood out for me was Pass4Future, their CBDE practice exams were close to the real thing and helped me identify gaps in logic, especially around Solidity quirks and EVM internals.

But here’s where things got interesting. Once I had a solid grasp of Ethereum dev, I started experimenting with Polkadot’s EVM-compatible parachains. Using Substrate’s pallet-evm, I realized many of the Solidity patterns I learned applied directly, though with some unique differences in gas metering, block finality, and infrastructure layers.

This made me wonder: for those of you who also started in Ethereum and moved into the Polkadot space, how smooth was your transition?

Did you reuse your Solidity codebase directly on Moonbeam or Astar?

Have you faced issues with tooling or testing when moving from Hardhat/Truffle into Polkadot's EVM-compatible chains?

And for those diving deeper, have you started exploring the shift from Solidity to ink!, and how steep was that learning curve?

Would love to hear how others are mapping their Ethereum dev background into the multichain world. The CBDE gave me a strong base, and now Polkadot is opening a lot of new doors I didn’t expect.

Let’s build and learn together!