RevX: A Rust Smart Contract IDE for Polkadot (Beta Testing Open Now)

Tech Talk
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Help shape RevX, our Rust smart contract IDE for Polkadot, and earn prizes for beta feedback.

The Parity team has developed a new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called RevX for simple RUST contract development. We’re opening the tool for beta testing, with the first 20 testers who meet the requirements receiving a small prize in DOT.

Building Smart Contracts in RUST on Polkadot Hub

With recent changes to the ink! ecosystem, including the discontinuation of the ink! Alliance, many Rust-based smart contract developers have been asking what comes next. Rust has always been an extremely powerful foundation for building in Web3, and that hasn’t changed. What changed is the need for a clearer, better-supported way forward.

Rust remains a first-class language for blockchain development, so to meet developers where they are today, we’re introducing RevX, a new Rust-based IDE, sandbox, and deployment environment designed for smart contract developers building with PolkaVM. It provides a streamlined space to write, test, and deploy Rust contracts with certainty and ease, backed by a maturing Revive environment on Polkadot Hub.

What is RevX? A Rust Smart Contract IDE for Polkadot

RevX aims to address gaps in smart contract deployment, particularly for Rust-based deployments.

Screenshot of the RevX IDE
Screenshot of the RevX IDE1920×962 63.4 KB

Smart Contract Deployment Pathways on Polkadot

Contract deployment can be confusing, especially if you’re new to the ecosystem and unsure of where to start. We strongly encourage everyone to first review the official Polkadot Documentation on Smart Contracts.

RevX BETA Testing is live!

We like feedback! With the RevX IDE now available to the public, we’re seeking 20 Beta testers to give it a test drive and provide feedback, with the first 20 rewarded with a small reward in DOT.

How do I get involved?

Step 1
Check out the IDE here! - https://revx.dev/

Step 2

The first 20 to meet the requirements laid out will be rewarded with 20 USD sent in DOT

  • Applicants MUST deploy x4 contracts on Polkadot. No testnets, only the mainnet is eligible for this beta testing.

  • Applicants must complete the beta testing feedback form available here.

  • Applicants must enter the Contract Address for each deployed contract in the designated box to receive 20 USD in DOT.

  • Feedback must be thorough. Any users attempting to game this will be excluded.

Step 3
Rewards are limited to the first 20 qualifying submissions, but all actionable feedback will directly shape RevX’s evolution. We encourage every Rust developer to test, experiment, and contribute.

Beta Testing Feedback Form

RevX Beta Testing - Feedback Form

Requirements

  • Deploy 4x Contracts on Polkadot
    • Deploying on testnets will not count
    • Must deploy using the RevX IDE
    • All deployments must be successful
  • Must provide clear and thorough feedback
    • Filling out the 2-minute form is critical for us
    • You must input your DOT address to receive your reward
    • You must input your 4x Contract Addresses into the provided slots

A quick celebration

Smart contracts are now live on Polkadot Hub, allowing builders to deploy Solidity-based contracts via pallet-revive, with all contracts compatible with both EVM and PVM execution backends.

If you’d like to get started on deploying your Solidity-based contracts on Polkadot, check out our refreshed docs to get started.

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Polkadot Digest 20 February 2026
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Not entirely sure I understand this. My understanding was:

  • Revive’s main goal is to bring Solidity/EVM compatibility to Polkadot Hub.

  • ink! was discontinued (at least in part) because the focus shifted toward that Solidity-first path.

So I’m confused why now promote writing smart contracts in Rust again, and on top of that without ink!.

What’s the intended benefit? Specially for newcomers. Did Ink! have bad performance or a bad direction?

Genuinely asking, I’m a bit lost and trying to understand the reasons for this. As an outsider (not parity, not super rust technical) it’s a bit confusing.

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I think it’s more correct to say the focus shifted “to the PolkadVM-first path”, than “to the solidity-first path”.

PolkaVM is built on RISC-V, which is language-agnostic by design. Revive is the Solidity compilation pathway into PolkaVM, but it was always the plan for PolkaVM to support multiple languages, Rust included.

What RevX does is give Rust developers a way to build contracts for PolkaVM without ink!; writing Rust that compiles to RISC-V directly rather than going through ink!'s framework and the old WebAssembly stack.

For newcomers right now? The Solidity path is honestly more mature and practical — familiar tooling, bigger community, more resources. But Rust on PolkaVM has a potential long-term performance edge.

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Amazing, thanks!

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Thanks for asking about ink!. A few things we wanted to address from the ink! alliance. We spent two years making ink! compatible with RiscV and PolkaVM – no longer using WASM. ink!'s maturity (7+ years of development) has already solved many of the DevEx issues that raw Rust is going to face.

Including:

  • ABI and metadata
  • Manual serialization
  • Storage Abstractions
  • Dispatch, entry points, events, etc.
  • Cross contract calls, with type safety
  • Testing frameworks
  • Years of tooling and examples

The ink! docs lay this out in detail. Bare rust contracts introduce a lot of foot-guns that ink! has solved already. Bare rust = more dangerous and more bugs.

Solana developers faced the same problem and built Anchor and Pinocchio, frameworks to make Rust smart contracts easier to build and safer. Every ecosystem that ships Rust smart contracts ends up building these abstraction layers because raw Rust alone doesn’t scale.

ink! can still be compatible with Polkadot Hub, but we need approval from W3F and Parity to get funding from the treasury.

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Was the plan to defund ink! development so that Parity could create their own Rust IDE and dev tools?

I am fine with that, but why was there no transparency in these decisions?

Why didn’t parity disclose their plans during the voting process?

I feel in the dark as a member of the community.

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Thank you for chiming in here @ink_alliance . You are 100% correct, bare Rust introduces complexities and footguns, and frameworks like ink! (similar to Anchor on Solana) are useful for safe, scalable smart contract development.

To clarify, RevX is an IDE (a tool), not a framework intended to replace ink!. In fact, our internal team originally built RevX specifically with ink! in mind because we felt the UI/UX tooling just wasn’t where it needed to be for browser based, quick product prototyping. When the ink! Alliance’s future became unclear, we had to pivot RevX to bare Rust on PolkaVM simply so that Rust developers still had a working environment on Polkadot Hub in the interim.

We have massive respect for the 7+ years of DevEx the ink! team has built. If ink! is able to secure funding through the Web3 Foundation or the Treasury to ensure its ongoing maintenance, the team would be absolutely thrilled to integrate ink! support back into the IDE.

We are on the same team: we all want Rust to thrive on Polkadot.

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@Karim, we really appreciate the transparency, respect and acknowledgment for ink!'s work. It’s great to hear RevX was originally built with ink! in mind, it’s a nice UI for DevX.

It would be great to start discussions again towards securing funding for ink!, but we’ve got a catch-22 we should address.

The last communication we received from W3F’s Governance Team was:
“Parity’s feedback remains that they are not in a position to endorse ink! as the strategic default path for Rust smart contracts on Polkadot Hub, and they still have open questions about expected demand for ink! relative to other contract development approaches.”

The situation since January 23rd has been Parity won’t endorse ink!, which blocks strategic support signaling from the W3F. So, the message here about “we’d love to support ink! if it gets funded” makes it confusing to us on how to proceed.

What the Alliance needs to re-engage is clarity:

  • Has Parity’s official position on ink! changed?
  • If Parity now supports ink! as a framework for Rust contracts on Polkadot Hub, will they say so publicly, in a way that unblocks funding?
  • If not, what is the endorsed plan for a secure developer experience layer above bare Rust?

We still care about this ecosystem, and feel deeply for the ink! community that has been impacted by ink!'s discontinuation. If Parity is interested in restarting discussions, we’d happily engage openly and transparently here on the Polkadot Forum. The goal can be towards treasury funding, or engaging directly with Parity/W3F for co-development.

We agree that we are on the same team, and look forward to creating some structure, a plan, and committed efforts moving forward.

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