Final report of Ink!ubator

Ecosystem
1

Hello Polkadot Builders and the whole Polkadot community,

The teams behind the ink!ubator are proud to present the Final Report of the ink!ubator. The ink!ubator supported community-driven projects, leveraging ink!

About the ink!ubator
ink!ubator is the initiative, funded by the Polkadot Treasury — the ink!ubator treasury proposal was successfully accepted in April 2023.
The ink!ubator aimed to bridge the gap in ink! smart contract development by providing tailored support and resources specifically for projects within the Substrate ecosystem.

Our Mission

The mission of the ink!ubator was to support community-driven projects built with ink! and parachains, especially those that want to expose selected APIs through contract palletes, and to flesh out a market for smart contract audits. Our vision was to create easily accessible and audited showcases of ink! smart contracts, fostering a more secure and innovative ecosystem. What we wanted to do, by the things we are doing, is to give to the developers the tools and resources to be able to really actualize their projects, which will bring in growth and success to the ink!

Team
Extensive experience of a curator and facilitator team allowed us to feel and express deeply the very challenges that founders usually face in the course of project development. We could give customized advice, we solved the problems in advance by improving the workflow, which reflected positively on the overall experience of teams that took part. This has made sure that not only would the atmosphere be nurturing, but also that each project would get the much-needed concentration and expertise required for growth. We have successfully continuously collaborated and gave feedback to create space for founders to focus on innovation, while leveraging knowledge of the ecosystem and strategic support.

Curators

  • Sam Rubert, Former ink! Core Developer
  • Sota Watanabe, Founder of Astar Foundation
  • Hernando Castano, Former ink! Core Developer
  • Markian Ivanichok, Founder & CEO at 727.ventures, Brushfam
  • Hang Yin, Co-founder & CTO at Phala Network
  • Michał Świętek, Development Lead at Aleph Zero
  • Facilitator: Toma Sadova, Growth Lead at Astar Foundation

Roundup

ink!ubator was an incubation program aimed at accelerating the projects built with ink! smart contracts in the Polkadot ecosystem. The program hands-on-supports teams over a period of 18 months by providing technical resources, guidance, and a structured environment in which to develop a given project. Moreover, it fostered collaboration, built key tutorials and documentation, and also discussions with third-party stakeholders-in an effort to further enhance ink! The ink!ubator reduced entry barriers and empowered the ink! developer community. This focus on innovation and ecosystem growth has set a firm foundation for forthcoming projects and further smart contract development within the ecosystem.

Please feel free to share your insights in the comments section of this post!

  1. Final report
  2. Previous report
  3. Bounties: Wasm Smart Contracts Bounty
  4. GitHub: ink!ubator · GitHub
  5. Website: ink! documentation
  6. Payments: Subsquare | Polkadot Treasury Child Bounties
5 Likes
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Thank you for the most excellent summary.

It is super clear that the direction of the contracts-pallet is to support have PVM as a target, with much more popular smart contract languages (Solidity, obviously) compiled to PVM. This is directionally compatible with PVM usage in JAM, the expected future of Polkadot.

If ink! continues to be supported by the Polkadot parachains, fine. We all know Astar tried as hard as it could to make it work as “The Future of Smart Contracts”, and we are grateful to have been part of this in 2023 working with ChainIDE.

But it seems natural to recharter the ink!ubator bounty to expand it to support:

  1. (definitely) revive-pallet development + deployments on Polkadot system chains and parachains
  2. (definitely) Solidity-to-PVM revive smart contract development
  3. (potentially) production-level contract deployments and audits on PAH and any Polkadot parachains
  4. (possibly) experimental “JAM” PVM services development, where JAM is a different kind of “Future of Smart Contracts”

Whereas the origin and history of this bounty has been ink! centric, expanding its charter to include what is now called revive, Plaza and JAM in a PolkaVM-centric future is the path Polkadot is on, and its time to adjust this. I believe the level resources allocated to the ink!ubator bounty is more than adequate but the curator group and the charter needs to be rethought.