September '22

One thousand GitHub stars 🤩

The ink! repository recently surpassed one thousand stars on GitHub. It’s now the third most starred Parity repository on GitHub, after Substrate and Polkadot. We want to say a big “Thank you!” to everyone who contributed in making this happen! Over the last few years we’ve seen contributions in all forms bring the project to where it stands today. Thank you for writing your contracts in ink!, for creating issues and pull requests, for providing us with good and constructive feedback, for answering questions on Substrate StackExchange, for creating third-party tooling for ink!, for writing blog posts about us, and for holding workshops!

A lot has happened over the last few years in the ink! world. The first commit was in December 2018 and our current version is v3.3.1. We’re working hard on shipping the next major iteration with v4.0 soon. An open point that comes up regularly is that we’ve never written an article explaining from start to finish what ink! is and how it ties into Substrate and Polkadot. This occasion was a great opportunity to do just that!

You can find the article at https://www.parity.io/blog/what-is-paritys-ink.

Beyond the Chain ⛓

ink! core developer Hernando hosted the "Beyond the Chain" meetups in Berlin (as part of the Berlin Blockchain Week) and in London. Hernando gave talks about the architecture of Unstoppable Applications, illustrating how the building blocks of Polkadot (like browser-embedded light clients) enable building those.

The meetups were packed! On the first floor of our office in Berlin we counted 90+ people.

Twitter 🐣

The bird has hatched! We've set up a Twitter account: @ink_lang, where we'll tweet about anything we find interesting.

ink! 4.0 is shaping up 📈

We've made a couple releases this month:

• ink! v4.0.0-alpha.3
• cargo-contract v2.0.0-alpha.2
• cargo-contract v2.0.0-alpha.3

We aim for a stable release of ink! v4.0 and cargo-contract v2.0 in late October.

You can find the tracking issue for ink! 4.0 here. Please note that we've moved XCM support to the roadmap of a 4.1 release, so it won't be included in 4.0. XCM support won't be a breaking change, hence we can put it into a subsequent 4.1.

Polkadot Forum 📣

One major achievement in the Polkadot/Kusama space this year was the creation of a dedicated StackExchange site: https://substrate.stackexchange.com.

The site is ideal for asking questions, but until now there was no platform for having longer-form discussions about the direction of Polkadot/Kusama. This changes now with the Polkadot Forum: https://forum.polkadot.network.

New Domain 🏠

We've moved this documentation portal from use.ink to a new domain: use.ink. It was a three letter domain, we just couldn't resist!