We Need To Make ink! Showcase Projects

Because ink! use cases under this initiative are common goods. These ink! templates are 100% open source and they can be deployed on any chain on Kusama or Polkadot that supports the contract pallet which is made by Parity.

In addition, the most well-funded projects in the ecosystem are Polkadot and Kusama. The budget size is at least 10 times bigger than relatively well-funded teams in the ecosystem like Astar, Moonbeam, and Parallel. Astar can compensate a part of the budget if you want but we will only fund Astar projects just like Polkadot funds only Polkadot projects. If a parachain leads this initiative with their own fund, the size is very small and there is a political issue since i don’t think it is possible for new small projects to compensate funds to join this initiative.

Plus, Kusama is burning around $40k every week and Polkadot is burning around $2M every week. Why not use them for ecosystem developments instead of burning tokens?

7 Likes

I would love to support this with doing a Seminar or even a short video series. Right now we’re already planning a Seminar for the ink! 4.0 release: [Topic Proposal]: ink! 4.0 Release Online Event · Issue #27 · substrate-developer-hub/substrate-seminar · GitHub. Please chime in with any ideas in the issue!

1 Like

This is a great idea. I’ve been chatting about this exact same thing with a client and a friend. A showcase project is very important. It will also help produce better tooling because we won’t be creating library code in a vacuum, but for code in production with specific needs. I think we should offer grant money and developer hours for the right projects. Everyone wins.

  1. If this is something we can kick off immediately I have two projects to discuss. sam.ruberti@parity.io
  2. I have a talk on ink! for Sub0. Perhaps we can use that as a platform to announce something to attract developers?
4 Likes

Any way OAK can help promote that talk let me know! Unfortunately we’re not speaking but @matt and I will be in the building trying to help push adoption so happy to assist however we can.

2 Likes

Hi all!

@sota this is a great initiative, we would love to be a part of it! Let me give a little background on our project - Aleph Zero:

As of now, we’re not a parachain but a sovereign chain built with Substrate. However, we plan to get a parachain slot when the substrate-to-substrate bridge is production ready and we can connect our chain to the dotsama ecosystem.

The pallet-contracts debuted on our testnet in June, and we’re waiting to push it to the mainnet when ink! 4.0 is released and the corresponding changes to the pallet contracts are released as well. Till now, there are more than 1200 contracts deployed on our testnet Aleph Zero/Substrate Portal. Those are only wasm contracts as we don’t have the pallet-evm.

Here is a list of most notable projects building on our chain that use Ink!:

We’re also preparing in-house a showcase dapp that will debut shortly after pushing pallet-contracts to the mainnet. This is meant as a surprise so I cannot disclose too many details, but it will be quite a large dapp built with several contracts.

We plan to add several privacy features like snarks and MPC accessible from the contracts. This is the main point we chose ink! over EVM. We’re currently working on the snark part and will add MPC later on.

We’re about to announce a grant program that will focus mainly on dapps but we’re more than happy to support any initiative that will increase ink! adoption, e.g. all the ideas mentioned above :slight_smile:

12 Likes

Why not a big ecosystem development fund focused around iNK and WASM based projects? We have a giant treasury. use it.

4 Likes

Just let you know that our core dev just released Uniswap V2 Dex template in ink! This type of template accelerates the ink! adoption since anyone can fork this GitHub and deploy it on any networks that support the contract pallet.

We would like to make these templates as many as possible together with ecosystem builders who are using ink! and the pallet.

3 Likes

Great to see a serious push for a joint effort @sota. We at SatoshiPay (Pendulum) already discussed setting up an alliance for those promoting Wasm/ink!, so would love to join the task force.

Our strategy so far has been to promote our Kusama chain, Amplitude, as a place to deploy and test the most popular EVM protocols. In order to encourage developers, we’ve launched a grant program for Amplitude to support those who translate popular, open source EVM-based protocols to Wasm. It’s a requirement that the translated code is open source, so the rest of the DotSama ecosystem can benefit from it.

2 Likes

Thank you very much for your reply. That’s good to know. That is a great initiative. The most important thing for this task force is to gather all commercial Wasm parachains and submit a treasury proposal.

Astar also has this type of grant but an initiative by a single parachain is still very weak to push ink!'s adoption inside/outside of Polkadot ecosystem.

1 Like

This is so hype! Awesome work @sota and team

Thank you everyone for your reply. This week, I reached out ink!/wasm projects and builders. As the next steps,

  • I will make a group of this task force with the guidance of Parity ink! developers.
  • Discuss the go-to-market strategy (treasury proposal? or bounty proposal?)
  • Define the scope of this task force
  • Submit the proposal to the council (by Sub0 in Nov)

If you are interested in this initiative, please reach out to @sotaweb3 on Telegram.

3 Likes

All the things you have talked in here are mainly related to running ink! on a parachain. Which is essentially the same as running a contract on ETH. IMO, we need something better, something really new when it comes to use ink!. Something that is only doable on Polkadot.

I had recently this idea with of creating an ink! only parathread. When we have parathreads we could provide like a ready to use runtime into that you can plug in one smart contract. The smart contract itself should be directly baked into the wasm file registered on the relay chain. If we do this, we could “abuse” the HeadData that each parachain/parathread gets on the relay chain to store the actual state. Currently this HeadData allows 20KiB of data. For sure that isn’t that much, but for small use cases it could already be enough. You could also play other kind of tricks like keeping your entire state in the PoV (then you would have like 5MiB of compressed data). The relay chain stores each PoV for 24 hours and also supports to recover a PoV. Here the idea would be that you don’t need to have any kind of infrastructure running, as long as you have one block per 24 hours. You could have an app running on your smartphone, modify the state and send a new block of the parathread to the relay chain from your smartphone.

I think there are probably use cases that could be build around this functionality. This parathread would probably also support XCM and be able to receive dots/ksm and to use it for some kind of functionality.

Leaving this idea here for someone to pick it up :wink:

8 Likes

Hello everyone. Thanks for your comments. Just a heads up. This proposal is now open to discuss on Polkassembly and will be submitted to the council.

1 Like

Awesome work guys :grinning: thanks for sharing that!

Thank you for your thoughs, that’s a really good idea. I hope we will see it realized someday!

1 Like

Thank you Sota for sparking these debates in advance!

I’m Matt Community Lead from SiO2.Finance team based on Astar.

We are building the next-generation lending platform that will support both Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Web Assembly (WASM).

In the short term, EVM will probably continue to dominate the Web3 space due to its history. But in the long term, with the high gas-efficiency and scalability, we believe WebAssembly is going to be the future.

Building a multi-VM lending hub supporting both EVM and WASM with easy-to-use one-click features will provide higher interoperability to the DeFi ecosystem during this time.

Thank for your time guys, Let’s buidl the future together!

2 Likes

Nice project, keep up the good work, I love what you guys are doing :+1::mechanical_arm::dizzy:

1 Like

Hey, KodaDot is interested in the first ink! NFT marketplace, yet we need to figure out how to cover the costs of getting a working indexer and implementation into our UI components so it would be beneficial for the existing user base of KodaDot instantly.

Happy to chat on this or can we figure out to offset implementation costs it through Treasury?

Thanks for your comment. We have launched this program and this info may help ink! documentation

Astar is really doing a fantastic job of promoting Polkasama to potential customers.

1 Like