Polkadot-API Project Update

Governance
21

A key point here is that PAPI is not a single library. It’s a suite of libraries and tools that power a growing set of downstream projects. So framing this as “no adoption” doesn’t match what we can observe in the ecosystem today.

Here are a few concrete examples of measurable dependency and what would materially break / degrade if funding pauses:

  • PolkadotJs uses PAPI: these days even PolkadotJs uses PAPI libraries. That’s an explicit, visible dependency in one of the most widely used developer/user-facing stacks. Also, that’s not its only PAPI dependency.

  • Widely-used NPM packages and downstream dependents:
    Also scale-ts is a PAPI library with ~140K weekly downloads. Talisman also heavily depends on libraries we maintain, and so it does subwallet, api-sidecar and many other important projects.

  • Ecosystem tooling built on top of PAPI:
    Another super useful tool that leverages PAPI is https://xcscan.io/ which is by far the best Chrosschain explorer that we have in the ecosystem.

  • PAPI Console adoption driven by real gaps:
    Another example of good adoption is the PAPI console, because the PJS console keeps on breaking and it can’t leverage the latest versions of metadata, or custom signed-extensions, or extrinsic v5, etc, etc, etc. So, despite the fact that the PAPI console is still in beta it has some super handy features that you don’t have with the PJS console, like a much better integration with Chopsticks, or concrete edits on binary data, etc, etc, etc.

  • Proven end-to-end usefulness in production:
    We have also proven the usefulness of the SDKs that we have been building putting together the only functional DApp that can be used for managing bounties, which is the one that all the bounties (including that used to pay you) use.

  • More tools depending on the stack:
    Multix is another tool that uses PAPI, and the same goes for the increasingly popular PAPI staking optimizer…

I’m happy to go deeper and enumerate dependencies more systematically (by package/tool, what uses it, and what breaks or degrades without maintenance). But the high-level answer is: there is already real, measurable adoption, and a funding pause primarily causes maintenance/compatibility lag that cascades onto wallets, tooling, explorers, and production apps over time.

I could keep giving you more and more examples, but it seems that you have already set your mind that PAPI has no adoption, so I think that I would simply be wasting my time :slightly_smiling_face:

EDIT

I forgot to mention 2 other important pieces of infrastructure which are currently using PAPI and that are IMO very much worth mentioning:

  • The new SDK that the Hydration team has been working on
  • ParaSpell

EDIT II

Also worth noting: many of the products Parity is currently building depended on PAPI. If leadership pushes a different stack going forward, that would be a political choice, not a technical one.

EDIT III

I’m super sorry. Someone just reminded me that I forgot 2 cool and useful DApps built with PAPI: Kheopswap and https://delegit.xyz/