It is a rainy January evening, and while the promise of renewal that comes with spring is on the horizon, we must share difficult news today.
With a heavy heart, we are announcing the discontinuation of ink! language development.
Despite sustained effort over the past months, we have been unable to secure renewed funding to continue the work. Given the significance of ink! to the Polkadot ecosystem and the trust placed in the Alliance as its stewards, we believe it would be inappropriate to simply end the project without providing a clear and complete account of how we arrived at this point, and the rationale behind this decision.
In the hope that we would eventually get a treasury proposal approved, we’ve been working without any source of finance, for free, for the past five months (some of us full-time). We have done this, as we believed that our work is a vital part of Polkadot’s future success and in the same belief that we would eventually secure renewed funding by bringing light to the truth of its need. We continued working to not fall behind the development of pallet-revive; we wanted to be ready for Polkadot Hub launch for a multiplicity of reasons.
TL;DR — Decision Timeline
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Sep 2025 – Dec 2025: The ink! Alliance continued full-time development without funding to keep ink! v6 aligned with pallet-revive, Polkadot SDK, and PolkaVM, in anticipation of securing continuity funding.
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Sep 2025 – Dec 2025: Three OpenGov proposals were submitted and iterated on in response to community and stakeholder feedback (Refs. 1760, 1773, 1796). Each was rejected despite progressive scope reduction and alignment.
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Dec 2025 – Jan 2026: The Alliance engaged directly with the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies, reworking scope and structure to meet updated strategic and governance guidelines resulting in the following draft proposal, including core business case assertions, to enable the necessary work to make ink! & PolkaVM a viable path for mainnet development.
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Jan 2026: While discussions were constructive, W3F confirmed it could not support ink! as a strategically necessary initiative, as for among other reasons, Parity indicated that it could not determine sufficient strategic reason to include ink! in the Polkadot Hub roadmap.
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Outcome: Without ecosystem alignment or a viable funding path for what is inherently common-good developer infrastructure, the Alliance concluded that continued advancement of ink! is no longer sustainable.
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Decision: ink! language development is therefore formally deprioritised as an official ecosystem initiative.
Report of all unfunded work carried out in Q4 '25.
Account of Work Performed Under Continued Stewardship
Technically, in the few last months
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We synchronised with the developments of
pallet-reviveandpolkadot-sdkand adapted ink!,cargo-contractand the Contracts UI to it. -
We implemented functionality into pallet-revive and merged it into
polkadot-sdk. Among that are a number of precompiles. -
We’ve contributed numerous bug reports and PRs to the broader Polkadot SDK ecosystem, including PolkaVM.
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We implemented support for a number of Polkadot SDK precompiles in ink! (XCM, Assets, …).
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We made sure ink! was up to date with the testnets and could always be used in the hackathons. We happily mentored and judged at hackathons throughout 2025. We were very happy to see so many winners using ink! in the November sub0 hackathon!
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Our website and documentation portal (https://use.ink/) was constantly upgraded and we are very proud of the state it reached.
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We were able to complete support for the Solidity ABI in ink!. This made it possible to use e.g. MetaMask or Hardhat with ink! contracts. It also made it possible to have Solidity contracts communicate with ink! contracts, as if they were just regular Solidity contracts.
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We conducted benchmarks and provided education on why low-level Rust smart contracts are not a viable option for onboarding developers (https://use.ink/docs/v6/background/pallet-revive-low-level-rust-contracts).
Since September, we’ve created three distinct proposals in OpenGov
Ref. 1760 — Long-term bounty approach (rejected):
The Alliance first attempted to secure continuity funding through a bounty-style structure, aiming for longer-horizon resourcing and maintenance. While directionally aligned with “common-good infrastructure,” the format and scope did not achieve sufficient consensus in OpenGov and was rejected. This is what we would have liked to do, and in our eyes represents the sustainable operating model for decentralised critical infrastructure and community, serving both Polkadot’s objectives and the fundamental ethos of decentralisation, of which, based on empirical analysis and hard data, we adamantly believe ink! to be a critical component.
Ref. 1773 — Treasury follow-up (rejected):
Following the bounty outcome, the Alliance returned with a milestone-based Treasury proposal focused on enabling Rust smart contracts on the Hub via ink! v6 and PolkaVM readiness. This iteration progressed the narrative and structure, but still failed to pass.
Ref. 1796 — “Technical Delivery” refinement (rejected):
The next iteration further tightened scope toward technical delivery with a reduction of community building effort & scope, explicitly positioning the work as the final production push for ink! v6 (stabilisation, audit remediation, and launch readiness), incorporating extensive FAQ-style clarification (see Ref 1796 Appendix) and more direct alignment to Hub launch requirements. Despite these improvements, it was also rejected.
The third proposal (Ref 1796) was our attempt to get at least the basic funding to bring the technical delivery over the line. We cut the budget down to the bare minimum for delivery and educational materials.
Additionally, R0GUE agreed to bear the costs for any business as usual operational work instead of including it in the proposal. In addition to the extensive amount of operational overhead it incurred in navigating OpenGov, ecosystem coordination, and creating the necessary reference materials to prove a solid case for ink! since September 2025 and even funding core development work in December.
Each proposal was a compromising iteration on the previous rejected proposal. We adjusted to feedback from the community, with our last proposal containing just the bare technical work to keep shipping ink!. We have diligently engaged with stakeholders:
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We went on a number of AAGs in the past months, presenting our proposals and answering questions.
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We’ve engaged with nearly every DV; in direct messages, DAO office hours, and Discord channels that we joined.
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We actively sought out people and tried to find a constructive path. This was successful, as a number of DVs changed their votes to Aye throughout the proposals (notably Saxemberg and Le Nexus - thank you).
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We’ve been active on X and our Telegram channel, encouraging people to vote and ask us questions.
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For nearly every comment under the proposals, we provided detailed feedback.
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We have been in close contact with Parity all the time. They had agreed to be involved in the proposals and be a curator. Unfortunately, our request for public support fell short.
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We want to emphasise that we sought contact with the Web3 Foundation. Two weeks before they Nay’ed our third OpenGov proposal, we had reached out, but had only received a reply about people being out of office. This Nay came as a distinct surprise to us.
Our Final Efforts To Save ink!
Following from the rejection of Ref 1796, we were encouraged by W3F to submit another proposal, which we have provided to both the W3F and Parity. At first, the discussions were positive. Unfortunately though, they eventually did let us know that they finally decided not to support the proposal if brought forward. We must agree to disagree, and accept that ink!'s day may come one day but now is not the time.
Based on both technical realities and observed developer adoption patterns, it is clear that meaningful Rust smart contract adoption on Polkadot depends on the availability of robust, shared tooling. ink! occupies this role by design, serving as the practical abstraction layer that makes Rust-based smart contract development viable, accessible, and sustainable on Polkadot.
If Polkadot intends to competently engage the broader Rust developer ecosystem in a scalable and efficient manner, this class of common-good developer infrastructure requires long-term, decentralised support. Ensuring the continuity of such tooling is also closely aligned with Polkadot’s long-standing commitment to open and community-driven software development.
Our thesis for the strategic need for ink! is based on the following core business case assertions outlined in this draft proposal document shared with the W3F and Parity as part of our discussions. In the appendix, one can also find a full itemisation of the work done in Q4 2025 that was executed on an unfunded basis based on our belief then (and now) that ink! is strategic common good infrastructure. This understanding has not been reached, which the Alliance objectively finds a confounding mystery as the evidence we have presented is irrevocably clear and verified by hard data.
For the good of Polkadot and ink!, we compromised ink! funding, our own personal finances, and R0GUE’s finances to the point where no further progress is possible beyond this proposal, and even then a portion would have been self-funded effort.
Closure
On Friday 23rd Jan we received confirmation from the W3F and Parity that further progression on alignment of ink! to the ecosystems priorities was no longer viable. As such we must in our capacity as stewards of ink! provide absolute, unequivocal, confirmation that ink! is now discontinued based on this information.
Sadly, not every endeavour leads to success, many don’t, we in the Web3 community are highly familiar with this reality, things just don’t line up sometimes. Given the level of commitment the Alliance members have demonstrated to the ecosystem, and based on our personal needs, we must very sadly come to an end of this story, and make way for new projects, although some Alliance members have expressed their personal wish to tinker with the code from time to time.. so is the way with works of passion.
However, unfortunately formal duties take precedent in this situation, and we are left with no other choice but to stop working on ink! as an officially prioritised ecosystem initiative at this point. We all have bills to pay and the last months of unpaid work have understandably left a heavy gap in Alliance member finances.
We would have loved to continue working on Rust smart contracts for the ink! community and broader Polkadot community (we love and share your passion), but unfortunately we are out of options at this point.
It has been a long journey together, we wish the ecosystem and everyone all the best.
FAQ
Why don’t you just release what you have?
The latest ink! and cargo-contract are available as beta releases. Note though that those releases are not compatible with the current version of pallet-revive. Parity only stabilised pallet-revive in December, with breaking changes happening as late as early December.
A proper, non-beta, release would require incorporating the latest pallet-revive changes. With a non-beta release we would create expectations around support, being tested, documentation, ongoing bug fixes, and eventually an audit. So it’s not trivial and this is what we would have required our keep-alive funding for.
What should I do if I have built my project with ink! in anticipation that I can deploy on Polkadot Asset Hub?
Unfortunately, there is no good way forward. You have the option to either use the low-level Rust API of pallet-revive or rewrite your contracts in Solidity.
We’ve created a page that compares ink! vs. low-level Rust here: https://use.ink/docs/v6/background/pallet-revive-low-level-rust-contracts. There are numerous points on this page, explaining why it’s not an undertaking that we can recommend to a general audience.
What happens to the repositories and https://use.ink/?
We have placed a link to this Forum post in the repository readmes, highlighting that ink! is not being actively developed, nor maintained.
The website and documentation are hosted on GitHub pages, they will stay online for the foreseeable future. The documentation contains a lot of more general information about pallet-revive, PolkaVM, and smart contracts in Polkadot in general. We hope that it still proves useful to the community.
What happens to ink!ubator?
There were four projects under active development for the ink!ubator. They all had already completed a number of milestones, but had one last, open milestone that they were actively working on. Those projects will get paid fully for their last milestone, but we leave it open to them if they want to finish it. The projects have been contacted by us in advance of this post.
and disappointing 
and sad 
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