Hello Polkadot Community!
The ink! Alliance has now been operating as a decentralised initiative for six months, and we’re excited to share the major milestones we’ve achieved. Our core mission remains clear: making ink! ready for the upcoming launch of pallet-revive and PolkaVM on Polkadot, and enabling seamless compatibility with Solidity and its tooling.
Here’s what we’ve accomplished together:
New Releases: ink! v5.1.x and cargo-contract updates
We’ve successfully released multiple significant updates:
- ink! v5.1.0 and v5.1.1 are live, introducing new features and enhancements. The most notable ones are XCM support and implementing the results from our audit by the SRLabs and Parity Security team.
- cargo-contract CLI has seen several iterative improvements across versions 4.1.2, 4.1.3, and the 5.0.x series up to 5.0.3.
Migration to pallet-revive & PolkaVM
Our ongoing migration work towards integrating ink! with pallet-revive and PolkaVM is advancing steadily. During this process, we uncovered several important bugs in PolkaVM and polkadot-sdk crates, clearly highlighting the value of a diverse ecosystem with different implementations and test vectors.
The ink! Alliance contributed by identifying these critical issues, making sure both ink! and the wider Polkadot ecosystem benefit from enhanced stability and readiness.
We’ve also directly contributed improvements to pallet-revive (the PolkaVM substrate pallet) to extend its capabilities, ensuring deeper and richer integration between runtime and contracts.
Solidity Compatibility
We’ve reached a major milestone by enabling Solidity compatibility in ink! tooling. Developers can now generate Solidity-compatible ABIs and metadata directly from cargo-contract, allowing Solidity developers and Ethereum tooling to seamlessly interact with ink! smart contracts.
- Done:
- Solidity-compatible ABI and metadata generation.
- Solidity ABI-compatible selectors for ink! messages.
- Solidity call input decoding for improved interoperability.
- In Progress:
- Planned:
Community Coordination & Public Meetings
The ink! Alliance maintains transparency through bi-weekly public meetings to synchronise, coordinate next steps, and share updates openly with the community. Everyone interested can access detailed notes from these meetings.
ink! Website Revamp
To better serve our growing community and unify our branding and developer experience, we initiated a bounty to revamp the ink! website. Multiple teams applied, the community curators selected a talented team, and exciting work is already underway!
Here’s a sneak peek:
Ecosystem Survey – Share Your Feedback!
We launched an ecosystem-wide survey to better understand the needs of the ecosystem, usage patterns, and suggestions. Whether an active ink! developer, a community enthusiast, or just curious about ink!, we collected feedback from everyone.
Developer Outreach & Sub0 Sponsorship
We proudly sponsored Sub0, held hands-on workshops, and supported developers through technical challenges at the event. The engagement and enthusiasm we saw were incredibly encouraging.
Virtual Workshops
We’ve also done many virtual workshops helping teach developers about ink!. This includes hosting several workshops for Encode Club’s ink! bootcamp, covering beginner concepts, up to more advanced topics like using cross-chain messaging. Additionally, we were honored to present ink! at Edgeware DAO.
Security Audits – ink! v5 Audit Completed
Security remains paramount. We’ve addressed and resolved all findings from our recent ink! v5 security audit, with auditors SRLabs praising the swift and comprehensive resolution.
Consistent Community Engagement
Our social media presence has steadily grown, with consistent posts (minimum twice weekly) highlighting technical updates, community stories, and more. We’re pleased to see significantly increased community interaction, interest, and awareness about ink!.
What’s Next?
The first six months have clearly demonstrated the effectiveness and resilience of our decentralised approach. The ink! Alliance has not only improved ink! itself but has provided significant contributions to the broader Polkadot ecosystem (notably pallet-revive and PolkaVM).
Our eyes remain firmly set on ensuring ink! is polished and ready when pallet-revive and PolkaVM launch on Polkadot, providing Rust-based smart contracts seamless execution alongside Solidity compatibility.
We invite everyone in the community to follow our journey and share your honest feedback. In return, we commit to improve and build what is necessary to empower developers to thrive within the Polkadot ecosystem.
We are extremely motivated and excited for the future of Polkadot’s Rust Smart Contract language, ink!!
Thank you all for your continued support!
Warm regards,
The ink! Alliance