Hi, my name is Jan-Jan, and I’m the technical project manager at Parity leading the Plaza upgrade. Here’s an update that I hope will be of interest to everyone building in the ecosystem.
In short: We are launching Ethereum compatible smart contracts on Polkadot in Q3.
Getting there progressively
This is a process in a couple of steps:
- First, we are launching minimum Ethereum compatibility on Kusama in the beginning of Q2 (i.e. you can deploy, and interact with, Solidity smart contracts, using well known tooling).
- Thereafter, again on Kusama, in the beginning of Q3, we are launching our first set of Ethereum precompiles (pre-written, optimized code that performs a specific, frequently used cryptographic or computational function), which we will supplement with unique Polkadot-specific precompiles to give access to governance, staking and cross-chain communication from smart contracts.
- Finally, we will deploy all of this together to Polkadot in Q3.
Adoption is the goal
But just building great code and a great developer experience – tools, documents, tutorials, hackathons and online support – isn’t enough, so we are also working with community partners to ensure
- key block explorer support and key oracle deployment from day 1, and
- fast follow adoption by tier 1 businesses across the most important verticals (such as DeFi, Gaming, AI, etc).
Reliability (x4) is the secret sauce
Our focus isn’t limited to a great developer experience, we are also focused on creating compelling business reasons to build on Polkadot. We plan to become the first choice for businesses developing smart contracts by offering best-in-class transaction reliability in terms of:
- throughput,
- latency,
- availability (or confidence), and
- cost.
Parity will even be adopting SLOs for these metrics, to keep ourselves focused on, and accountable to, the businesses and users of Polkadot. This is a reflection of our increased focus on user and business happiness, which we know can be impacted by the code we or others contribute.
How you can help
As we deploy on Westend (effectively our Beta site) we will be reaching out to the community via the Forum to help us test, and to give us feedback on the developer experience. Please be critical of
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How easy is it to get up-and-running?
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Whether the examples are useful for the dapp you want to build?
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Which further example would be very beneficial?
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Which precompiles are missing for your dapp?
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Is the tooling support good enough? What improvements do you need for your development process?
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How good is the support you are receiving on solidity-smart-contracts channel on Discord?
If you want to start now, please go to https://contracts.polkadot.io (note: we have not launched precompiles on Beta yet).
Please give your feedback on this post or on Discord.
Going forward
After our initial Polkadot launch, in addition to helping adoption by tier 1 businesses (as mentioned above), we will continue to
- progressively launch more precompiles,
- onboard more Polkadot compatible Ethereum infrastructure primitives (such as oracles, block explorers, etc.), and
- improve the reliability across our 4 metrics.
Addendum: Asset Hub Migration
The Asset Hub Migration is implicit in this update, and it will be visible to users as lower existential deposits, lower fees, better wallet UX, fee flexibility, and smart contract functionality unique to Polkadot. And we are working with our community partners (Wallets, Exchanges, etc) to make sure it happens seamlessly. For those of you nonetheless interested, we will be migrating Staking, Governance, and Balances from the Relay Chain to the Asset Hub
- on Kusama by the middle of Q2, and
- on Polkadot by the middle of Q3.
