August '22

Releases 🚢

We've made a couple releases this month:

• cargo-contract v1.5.0
• ink! v4.0.0-alpha.1
• cargo-contract v2.0.0-alpha.1

Our goal is to publish the next major releases of ink! and cargo-contract in October; this will then be ink! 4.0 with an accompanying cargo-contract 2.0. You can find the tracking issue for ink! 4.0 here.

W3F Grant 🙌

cargo-contract currently requires some external dependencies to be installed by users before they can use it. One of those is wasm-opt, which we use for optimizing the WebAssembly file size of an ink! contract.

Having this tool as an external dependency is causing friction for beginners. They have to install it manually and the process varies for each operating system. It bloats up the cargo-contract installation instructions and people not following them properly run into errors because of a missing dependency.

Luckily @brson and @aimeedeer have applied for a Web3 Foundation (W3F) grant to fix exactly that for wasm-opt! They've delivered the first milestone ‒ a proof of concept ‒ this month. You can read their summary here.

Their next milestone is the integration into cargo-contract which will reduce our installation instructions by one step 🙌!

Squink in Cambridge 🇬🇧

Some people from our team spent a week in Cambridge for a Parity event. We can't disclose too much about it at this point, but there'll be more information on it in a while.

We brought our mascot Squink along and Andrew played around with his early access to DALL·E 2. The photo below was generated by asking for Instagram posts of Squink visiting the Corpus Christi college in Cambridge.

Swanky 😎

The Astar team has developed a suite of tools for WebAssembly smart contract development called Swanky!

It consists of a command-line tool and a node for easy contract development. Read more about it in their Medium post.