I think Josep’s sentence about the “two unappealing options” wasn’t a wish-list of both things; he meant that each option, on its own, is unattractive:
- Expose only a tiny, minimal interface: Great for safety, but not so great for builders. If the precompile shows very little, contracts still need kludgy off-chain workarounds or multi-tx flows—exactly the UX pain he was highlighting.
- Expose richer functionality via precompiles: Great for short-term Solidity onboarding, dangerous for Polkadot’s long-term evolution. Because precompile ABIs must stay frozen, every future runtime breakthrough would have to preserve yesterday’s interface—or fragment state across new addresses. Cyrill summed this up well in his post (“we do not break contract-space”).
Polkadot’s edge has always been its freedom to evolve rapidly at the protocol layer; locking system pallets behind immutable ABIs risks dulling that edge.
The problem
To me, the technical debate points to a deeper problem: communication
- A while back the community agreed on the Plaza strategy— Polkadot pallets + EVM hub. Back then nobody could map every downstream consequence.
- Inside Parity they most probably have been wrestling with real-world constraints, trade-offs, and deadlines. From the outside, most of us only glimpse the finished decision: “Polkadot Hub will launch with NFTs, tokens, XCM and governance precompiles.”
- By the time external teams understand the fallout—UX trade-offs, ABI lock-in, economic impacts—those decisions already feel baked.
In short: the rest of the ecosystem can’t help course-correct if we don’t see the course map until the ship has sailed.
A way forward
Polkadot is a decentralised network of teams—from one-person dev shops to VC-backed companies—who all care deeply about its success. If we treat Hub design as an open RFC process instead of an internal deliverable, we can:
- Crowd-source edge-case feedback before ABIs freeze.
- Share the rationale behind tough calls (security, resourcing, timelines).
- Align the Hub’s feature set with real DApp builders’ needs, not just our guesses.
Polkadot Hub can be a huge win—if we keep the conversation two-way. Together we should hammer out which precompiles truly belong in Hub v1, which can stay experimental (lets use Paseo and Kusama!!!), and how we’ll revisit the set without kneecapping innovation down the road.