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.