Thank you for bringing up this topic Josep, this is exactly what we have been working on with Pop Network via our treasury proposal.
To start, here you can find an example contract which interacts with the NFTs pallet which you can deploy on our testnet, which queries the next collection id then creates a collection, all in one contract message. A contract message can interact with the runtime as much as it wants, queries or execution of extrinsics, but of course it has to respect the weight it uses and thus the fees.
We are currently working on converting our Pop API, which is using a Chain Extension, to a Precompile and make it ready for pallet revive. Note that there is a difference in how we have designed the Pop API, one versioned “precompile” for the entire runtime, compared to the precompiles that will be deployed on Polkadot Hub which will be a precompile for each use case (interesting post about this here). In the upcoming days we will explain what we have built for Pop Network and why in more detail.
To the rest of your questions.
-
No, any contract that can compile to PVM will be able to interact with these precompiles. However, precompiles have to use the sol ABI and thus the contracts interacting with that too. Please correct me if I’m wrong. ink! will be compatible with the sol ABI.
-
Westend I’m not sure but you can deploy the contract shared above on Pop Network’s testnet.
-
“”
-
As mentioned in @Cyrill’s post here, precompiles should never change interface, in stead a new one has to be created if interfaces want to be changed. On the contrary, Pop API’s thinking has been to create a versioned interface.
On making the Polkadot Hub a rich platform in which to create smart contract based solutions, I invite everyone to check the list of pallets that these upcoming contracts will coexist with. I think the community should feel empowered to create pre-compiles that cover not only the pallets initially planned by Parity (assets, nfts, governance) but also the other pallets in that list that may be useful for contracts, and beyond that, suggesting and building pallets that the Polkadot Hub will need to compete in the wider blockchain industry.