This post provides an overview of the current status of ink!, its role in the Polkadot ecosystem, and the associated risks. It is a purely informational update for ecosystem stakeholders, summarising the present state of ink! and the decentralised yet cohesive and strategically aligned work carried out by the ink! community and the Alliance.
1/ Current Status
Over the past year, the ink! Alliance has been highly active across delivery and ecosystem technical advancement, with many successes, to name a few:
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Migrating ink! from Wasm to PolkaVM (pallet-revive)
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Upgrading core tooling, documentation, and a full use.ink and brand update
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Making significant contributions to PolkaVM, pallet-revive, and alloy-rs
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Providing ongoing direct developer support
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Delivering ink! ↔ Solidity ABI compatibility
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Supporting the Web3 Summit and the Buenos Aires hackathons
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Mentoring at the PBA in Bali
Despite this progress, ink! v6 is not yet in production. It is currently in an unoptimised beta state and depends on:
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A security audit and remediation (auditor identified, but work currently paused due to uncertainty of funding for ink!)
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The production launch of PolkaVM on the Hub
The dependency for PolkaVM is bidirectional:
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PolkaVM requires a production-ready smart contract language
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ink! v6 requires PolkaVM to run
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Adoption can only begin after production launch
Status Summary: Before ink! v6 can be safely used with pallet-revive / PolkaVM, audit remediation is still required.
Source 1: Polkassembly Referendum 1796: Alliance Clarification 1
2/ Historical Context: Why v5 ≠v6
Addressing conjecture, ink! v5 did not fail due to the language.
It operated in an ecosystem context where success was structurally constrained:
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Fragmented liquidity
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No native-ink! platform to deploy on
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No unified Hub
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Low on-chain economic activity
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Weak brand capital
ink! v6 operates in a fundamentally different environment, both within Polkadot & based on the macro Rust adoption trends:
a. Polkadot Unification / Cryptoeconomic Alignment
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A unified, production-grade Hub
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Shared liquidity
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PolkaVM
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DOT-native programmability
b. Macro Web3 Rust adoption trend
- Rust is now onboarding Rust developers 30% faster than Solidity for the top 20 blockchains
This is not an argument against Solidity. Solidity remains critical infrastructure. It is just the necessary evidence that Rust is now the fastest-growing onboarding funnel in Web3.
Therefore, we can’t judge v6’s success based on v5 outcomes.
Source 2: Polkassembly Referendum 1796: Alliance Clarification 2
Source 3: Polkadot Forum: Rust > Solidity: Data Doesn’t Lie
3/ ink! As The Direct Rust → DOT Pathway
ink! is:
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Rust
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A smart contract eDSL/framework (analogous to FRAME for runtimes)
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The only PolkaVM-compatible smart contract language at Hub launch
Smart contracts are the market mechanism that allows utility, experimentation, and value creation to emerge permissionlessly on-chain.
Prioritising smart contract enablement therefore prioritises:
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Open participation
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Low barriers to entry
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Bottom-up innovation
Economic theory and historical evidence strongly suggest that competitive, open markets tend to be more productive and innovative than centrally planned systems.
Supporting evidence for this can be seen in the recent Polkadot Builder Party winner selection, where projects built with ink! were strongly represented and outperformed Solidity-based submissions.
ink! delivers better DevX vs Bare Rust without sacrificing performance:
Benchmarks comparing ink! vs Bare Rust show that ink! significantly reduces boilerplate, improves safety, and maintains comparable (or better) performance.
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~3Ă— less code, ~45% boilerplate eliminated
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Comparable gas usage, smaller binaries, fewer instructions
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Strong compile-time safety and built-in testing
This makes ink! more productive, maintainable, and accessible for most developers, while still allowing low-level Rust where maximum control is required.
Source 4: ink! vs Bare Rust Smart Contracts
4/ Concrete Efficiency, Safety, and Capability to Drive Privacy on Polkadot
A recent example shows ZK Noir circuits generated natively in ink! v6 (PolkaVM-backed).
From the implementers:
“The result is a verifier contract that achieves ~25% gas savings, 45% smaller binary size, and full Rust type safety compared to Solidity alternatives; all while being completely self-contained and requiring zero external dependencies once deployed.”
Type Safety is a Superpower: Rust’s compile-time guarantees caught numerous subtle bugs in field arithmetic and proof handling that would have been runtime failures in Solidity.
Even in an unoptimized beta setting, ink! demonstrated better performance and stronger safety guarantees, while remaining interoperable with Solidity via ABI compatibility.
Source 5: Polkadot Builder Party: iVF Project
5/ Developer Experience as Onboarding Infrastructure
Beyond tooling, the ink!ubator has strategically prioritised Monsters ink!, which:
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Gamifies onboarding for first-time developers
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Helps newcomers take their first steps with ink! & Polakdot
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Mints a unique NFT on course completion, introducing asset ownership in a low-friction way
Monsters ink! uses state of the art image and 3d generation models to create personalized, evolving monsters that grow as the users progress through the curriculum, serving as both their companion and their proof-of-knowledge onchain card.
This positions ink! not only as smart contract infrastructure, but as an emerging decentralized DevRel surface for the ecosystem.
Source 6: Monsters ink! Milestone 2 Loom
Source 7: Monsters ink! Milestone 2 Delivery
6/ The Risk To Innovation
ink! is currently unfunded.
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Core contributors have worked unpaid for ~4 months
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Development and support has now been paused as a result
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Required audits and remediation cannot be completed
This is not about promoting ink! in isolation.
It is about whether Polkadot launches the Hub with:
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A Rust-native smart contract path
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A viable Rust developer funnel
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Production-ready, audited tooling aligned with Polkadot’s innovative and decentralised identity
7/ Closing Thoughts
The ink! Alliance has initiated discussions with Web3 Foundation and Parity. At present however, development, support and operations are paused due to lack of funding and there is no confirmed timeline for continuation. This is an important consideration for teams building with ink! v6 on testnet, and we feel it is essential to be transparent about the current situation.
FAQ: Clarifying Next Steps For Builders
a. What does “paused” mean in practice?
“Paused” means that there is currently no funded, active development capacity for ink!. This includes:
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No guaranteed engineering work on ink! v6
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No formal maintenance, roadmap execution, or feature delivery
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No assured responsiveness for GitHub issues, pull requests, or community support channels
The code remains open source and available, but there is no resourced team actively stewarding day-to-day development at this time.
b. What should I do if I’ve already built with ink! expecting to deploy on Polkadot Hub?
Objectively: ink! may be funded, we are just uncertain as of this moment and need to discuss more with Parity and the W3F.
If you have built with ink! in anticipation of deploying to the Polkadot Hub:
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Your work is not invalidated
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ink! v6 remains technically aligned with PolkaVM, however, your contracts are not compatible with the current version of Revive on Paseo AssetHub or intended for Mainnet release - This cannot be rectified without further funding for development
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However, production readiness is not guaranteed without resumed operations, development, and audit remediation
Teams should treat ink! v6 as experimental until such a time that development resumes and production criteria are met. Planning assumptions should be updated accordingly.
c. When will we know more about the funding of ink!?
At a minimum, updates on funding will follow once Parity and Web3 Foundation return from the holiday period. The ink! Alliance will resume discussions with them at that point and will keep the community informed as conversations progress. At present, no specific timeline or outcome can be guaranteed.
We firmly believe in ink! and in the work delivered to date, both by our community members and the Alliance participants stewarding the language.
That work reflects careful long-term prioritisation, adaptability, strategic relevance, and rational coherence. The ink! Alliance remains committed to progressing ink! v6 toward production readiness and will continue to explore viable paths to resume development and bring this work to completion, however, as it stands, that future is less than certain for the Hub.