$362k for ink! v6 — Can Someone Explain Why Parity Isn’t Paying?

Ecosystem
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I’m currently looking at the ongoing ink! v6 proposal (PolkaVM production-ready version, requesting 362,500 USDC).
But I’m stuck on one very simple question and genuinely want to hear everyone’s thoughts:
Why is this money coming from the treasury instead of Parity Technologies paying for it themselves?

ink! has been a Parity-led project from day one
Back then, Parity themselves hyped “writing contracts in Rust” as Polkadot’s biggest differentiator everywhere.
So why, every time we reach a critical milestone, does it suddenly become “the community treasury foots the bill”?
This is already the fourth time
Ref #1123 passed and actually delivered; the other two got rejected by the community.
This time the scope is smaller, yet it’s still 362.5k USDC from the treasury.

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They stated a long time ago that they realized Ink is not necesarity a good bet against solidity. There’s some discussions about it right here in this forum. That’s why they were left to continue pushing for it elsewhere.

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Data has showes differently though: Rust > Solidity: Data Doesn’t Lie

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Since Parity is not using Ink! I am wondering why you think we should pay for it?

We are also having another look at Ink! and see if we would benefit from using it.

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OKay. Got your mean. But why so much DV vote AYE in Referendum #1796?

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It seems like you should be asking the DVs this, or reading one of the five comments left by DV explaining their rationale. Pierre has absolutely nothing to do with the DV program.

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I’m honestly having a very hard time understanding the rationale behind the recent W3F decisions.

In one case, @tien’s initial proposal was NAYed and forced to resubmit because it didn’t include milestone payouts. Now, on a proposal with a significantly larger budget request and no milestone structure, the response is that “it’s up to the DVs to decide.”

This seems inconsistent to me.

  • Why is the lack of milestones a blocker in one proposal but not even raised as an issue in another, larger one?
  • Is the idea to wait until the confirmation period to NAY this proposal?
  • What is the actual, consistent standard being applied here?

From the PAPI team’s perspective, this is important to understand. If we were to submit a large, non–milestone-based proposal (with solid justification, of course), would the W3F also leave it entirely up to DVs and other token holders? Or would we be NAYed upfront on the basis that it isn’t milestone-based?

I’m not trying to be confrontational here. I just want to understand the principles and criteria being applied so teams can plan proposals accordingly.

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Hi there @dandan,

we want to clarify a few things due to the tone of this thread:

Even though we have moved out of Parity, there is still an ongoing collaboration and constant exchange with Parity and W3F. If you read the ink! Alliance’s proposal, you will see that Parity has engaged with us to be one of the overseeing curators.

Similarly, since the decentralization from Parity, the W3F continues to be a curator of the ink!ubator bounty. We have bi-weekly calls to discuss the distribution of this bounty. Someone from W3F takes part in those calls.

ink! leaving Parity was not because the product was bad, it was as a general decentralization effort inside Parity at the time. Parity had grown a lot and a lot of products that were not core-Polkadot had emerged. With us, a number of other products (like PAPI, polkadot-js, or wasmi) moved outside. You can read more details how this happened here.

For ink!, this means that there are now more stakeholders besides just Parity. Specifically, a number of ecosystem teams are involved and our bi-weekly alignment call always has a number of attendees who are not ex-Parity (e.g. from Virto Network or Hyperbridge).

It is also important to note that at the time (2023) when the decision to decentralize ink! was made, the macro forces in Web3 were different. Now that Rust is onboarding developers 30% faster than Solidity, the previous decision to deprioritise ink! is being revisited. This is why, as Pierre correctly states above, the ink! Alliance is actively collaborating with Parity to evaluate ink! v6. Nobody can know the future, only make the best decisions with the current information at hand.

We also want to highlight that we (the ink! Alliance) have been actively contributing to core-Polkadot SDK repositories, as part of working on ink!. You can find the tracking issues here. Notably there are a number of contributions to PolkaVM and polkadot-sdk. Meaning: work on ink! continues to be integrated into broader Parity and W3F efforts.

This is a complex situation, we acknowledge this, and thank everyone for their support and collaboration.

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