About ink!
What is ink!?
ink! is a programming language for smart contracts — one of several that blockchains built with the Polkadot SDK can choose from. It's an opinionated language created by Parity team members by extending the popular Rust programming language with functionality needed to make it smart contract compatible.
History of ink!
YEARS
The early years — a squink is born
In 2019, ink! started out as a small project at Parity Technologies (the company that stewarded Polkadot). Over the years, ink! grew into a sophisticated ecosystem and a community did form around it. Throughout all this time Parity continued to allocate developer resources to the project, which is amazing!
In April 2024, ink! moved out of the Parity umbrella. Instead of one company, it is nowadays developed and maintained by an alliance of individual developers, companies, and community teams altogether. You can read more on our transition out of Parity here.
We continue to work closely with Parity, we contribute code to Parity-maintained components and regularly synchronize with Parity developers. Parity continues to be involved in ink! as well: in late 2024 SRLabs and the Parity security team conducted an audit of ink! v5 (read more here).
YEAR
Introducing the Alliance
The ink! Alliance holds bi-weekly meetings about the continued development and direction of ink!. That concerns all product aspects, from core development to for example putting out a public call for redoing our old and clunky website to the shiny new thing you are currently surfing (see here for more info).
We record our meeting notes in this repository.
The Alliance also created a Use Ink Ltd. in the UK to which all licenses and intellectual property was transferred.
The largest part of our funding comes from the Polkadot treasury. We are very happy about this continued support! The treasury proposals are all open and transparent, our last big one was this one.
The funding got transferred to this multisig, which is controlled by six curators with a threshold of 4/6 approvals.
If you are interested in contributing to ink! or joining one of these calls, just talk to us in the ink! Developers Group on Telegram or pick up one of our Good First Issues.
TODAY
TRANSITION TO A Community Project
The ink!ubator is a community-driven funding program for advancing the ink! ecosystem. The first round of projects was completed in autumn 2024! A final summary was posted by Toma, one of the curators, on the Polkadot Forum here.
Applications for the second round are currently open. The best way to follow this is to watch the ink!ubator 2.0 repository on GitHub.