April '22

Releases 🆕

For ink! we released v3.0.1 with minor bugfixes. Besides that we made a number of improvements to our examples ‒ mostly to our upgradeable contracts examples.

For cargo-contract we released v1.1.1 and v1.2.0 with bug fixes, a new sub-command decode, and improved support for the call and instantiate sub-commands.

For tutorials, development and testing we recommend using our substrate-contracts-node. We issued the release v0.13.0, which is in sync with a recent Substrate master (see the release notes for the specific commit hash). Pre-built binaries for the release are available for Linux and Mac.

Community Badges 🙌

We've added two versions of a community badge.

If you have a public repository with an ink! contract it would be awesome if you could add one of those!

Normal Design

[![Built with ink!](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paritytech/ink/master/.images/badge.svg)](https://github.com/paritytech/ink)

Flat Design

[![Built with ink!](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paritytech/ink/master/.images/badge_flat.svg)](https://github.com/paritytech/ink)

Team Retreat in Athens 🇬🇷

We ‒ the developers working on ink!, Substrate's pallet-contracts, and the Contracts UI ‒ went on a team retreat in April. We discussed our roadmap for the rest of this year, as well as some technical designs of how we want to implement e.g. XCM in ink!. We're normally working across different time zones, with some of us embracing the digital nomad lifestyle. Hence it was very productive to gather together for a week.

We also did a little hackathon to do some dog-fooding: we've built a Dapp that makes use of all components by the above teams. We plan to open source it soon, stay tuned for that 😎.

There's a lot on the horizon and we're enthusiastic about the rest of this year!

Spanish Twitter Space 🐦

Hernando was a guest at the spanish Polkadot Twitter Space. The space has been recorded: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1MnGnkgmNdBJO.

StackExchange Public Beta

The Substrate & Polkadot StackExchange site has graduated from its private beta ‒ the site is now in public beta!

This means that the site is now indexed by search engines and can be browser without any user account.

If you have any questions regarding ink! or smart contracts on Substrate this is the place to be.

Canvas Update

You may know that we were working on a common good smart contracts parachain named Canvas. We've decided to put this project on hold. This gives us more room to make ink! and the pallet-contracts as competitive as possible, as well as help parachain teams include those. This is not to say that we'll never get back to Canvas, but as of right now we're no longer working on this project.