Over the past year, Pop CLI has grown into one of the most comprehensive tools for building with the Polkadot SDK and ink! (Rust) smart contracts. Funded through the Web3 Foundation’s Decentralized Futures program, Pop CLI has successfully delivered four grant milestones — spanning parachain and contract scaffolding, local testnet support, deployment to the Polkadot Development Portal (PDP), and tools for testing, signing, and benchmarking.
Source: https://x.com/onpopio/status/1918257373271019717
Today, Pop CLI is used across the ecosystem by teams building parachains, smart contracts, and hybrid applications. You can read the full development story here.
Advancing Polkadot DevX
As we plan the next phase of Pop CLI development, we are seeking input from the wider developer community.
To ensure the roadmap reflects real needs, we have launched a short Developer Survey (estimated time to complete: 3–5 minutes). The survey is designed to help us better understand which features and workflows are most valuable to you, and which gaps remain in the current developer experience.
Survey link:
What Comes Next
Based on survey results and broader community input, we will define and prioritize the scope of work for the next six months of Pop CLI development. Some of the areas already under consideration include:
Chain Workflows:
- Build:
- Omninode support (shared runtimes, hybrid use cases)
- Audited chain templates (maintained by R0GUE)
- Auto-upgrade support (psvm integration, transaction version bump detection)
- Frontend templates for full-stack dApps on top of your chain
- Test:
- Dry-run extrinsics, fork chains, simulate live state (e.g. Chopsticks or Zombie-bite integrations)
- View on-chain state (inspect storage keys via pop call chain)
- Chain fuzzing (pop test with randomized inputs to uncover runtime bugs)
- Fee Reporter (estimate weight → fee)
- Deploy:
- Enhanced PDP integration (auto-generate API keys, runtime upgrades, lifecycle ops)
- Interactive Network Config Generator (.toml wizard to launch local network with known parachains and HRMP channels)
- Integration with additional external infra providers (e.g. Zeeve’s Perfuse)
Contract Workflows:
- Build:
- Expand the number of templates in Pop CLI to cover more use cases (e.g. multichain contracts)
- Frontend templates for full-stack dApps on top of your contract.
- Other utilities (address generation, key management, signing messages)
- Test:
- Contract fuzzing (
pop test –fuzz
) - View contract state (inspect via pop call contract)
- Simulate transactions and fork a network (e.g., Chopsticks integration)
- Contract fuzzing (
- Deploy:
- Verifiable builds (deterministically build the contract) and contract verification
- Interactive Network Config Generator (.toml wizard to launch local network with known parachains and HRMP channels)
Get Involved
If you are using Pop CLI or looking to improve the developer experience on Polkadot, your input is extremely valuable. We invite you to take the survey, share feedback below, or connect with us directly via our community channels.
Thank you for helping shape the next chapter of Pop CLI, and for your continued efforts to make Polkadot a more productive and welcoming ecosystem for developers.
X: https://x.com/onpopio
Telegram: Telegram: View @onpopio