It has been a while since our last report on our novel smart contract platform “Revive”. This post gives an update on where we are today, what we have been working on over the past months, and when the platform will go live.
Launch timeline
Revive is now in the final stage of the release process.
- Kusama
The runtime upgrade will be proposed via referendum this week and enactment is expected at the end of December. - Polkadot
We will submit the referendum shortly after at the beginning of January 2026.
Enactment is scheduled for January 20, 2026.
This places the launch slightly later than originally planned.
What we’ve been working on
Over the past months, the team has been working intensely on delivering the full scope of features planned for the initial release of Revive.
The main components completed for this milestone are as follows.
Revm integration
With the addition of the Revm backend, Revive supports both EVM and PVM smart contracts that are fully interoperable. Solidity contracts can be deployed unchanged, and developers can keep using familiar Ethereum tooling.
Gas mapping
We implemented a mapping from Ethereum gas to Substrate weights, which is Polkadot’s underlying fee system.
This was a challenging part of our platform to get right. The model is not completely identical to Ethereum’s gas model but it is internally consistent and designed to behave predictably within Polkadot’s execution model. We plan to go deeper into this topic in a future post.
Ethereum blocks
Revive exposes Ethereum-compatible block data. This allows infrastructure and applications that rely on block metadata and inclusion proofs to function as expected.
Developer tooling
We added support for popular Ethereum tooling such as Foundry and Hardhat.
This includes local test nodes based on Anvil, backed by pallet-revive as the execution engine, so developers can test against the actual Revive environment rather than a reference chain. These tools are already usable, and we continue to extend them with additional features and improvements.
Testing and validation
In parallel with feature development, a large part of our effort went into testing. Here we invested heavily to gain confidence in the platform before launch. This included:
- Compatibility testing: We ran large, well-known Ethereum test suites with many tens of thousands of test cases to validate contract behavior across a wide range of scenarios.
- Differential testing: We compared Revive’s behavior against reference Ethereum implementations to detect and analyze divergences early.
- Stress testing and benchmarking: We tested the platform under load and measured performance characteristics across different execution paths.
This work took time, but it was essential. The goal is that developers can rely on Revive to behave correctly and consistently across all use cases from day one.
Elastic Scaling
The upcoming runtime upgrade for Kusama Hub includes more than just Revive: it is bundled with Elastic Scaling, a major improvement that enables higher throughput and prepares the chain for shorter block times. While the block time will not change immediately at enactment, it will be enabled shortly after, reducing block times from 6 seconds to 2 seconds. This lowers the latency of smart contract execution considerably.
Looking ahead
With this initial release, Revive provides a solid foundation:
- Developers can deploy unmodified Solidity contracts using familiar tooling. Additionally Revive supports smart contracts written in Rust (and ink!).
- Polkadot-specific features such as access to different assets and messaging with other chains via XCM are available via precompiles.
- Both EVM and PVM execution paths are available and they share tooling and infrastructure.
This is only the first step. Many important improvements are planned for the coming months. Having this foundation live allows us to iterate faster and build on real-world usage and feedback.
Thank you for your patience and continued interest. We’re looking forward to seeing Revive used in practice on Kusama and Polkadot.
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