ink! begins new journey with R0GUE, Aleph Zero and Scio Labs

Parity Technologies is excited to announce that Polkadot's native smart contract language ink! will be collectively shaped by a number of ecosystem teams going forward. The R0GUE team will initially steward the new journey, and ink! will continue to thrive with support from Aleph Zero and Scio Labs.

R0GUE is a collective of skilled engineers with a long-term understanding of the Polkadot tech stack. Enabling developers, communities and businesses to get started in Web3, its team members have been involved in building four parachains already, while advising and supporting dozens more.

Parity has made good progress taking ink! to a position where it is now ready to be given more dedicated support. R0GUE has the right combination of resources and personnel to provide such support to move ink! forward, allowing Parity to concentrate on its core role, continuing to develop the technical infrastructure of Polkadot.

'Excited and confident'

R0GUE founder Peter White said: "We are honored to be a part of the driving collective transitioning the ink! smart contract language from Parity to the Polkadot ecosystem. This transition makes us more excited and confident than ever for the future of ink! as it enters a new era led and shaped by the community."

"We believe that ink! will serve a crucial role in onboarding developers, providing a seamless experience and powerful outcomes only possible on Polkadot. We look forward to setting out on this journey with you and invite everyone to help shape the next chapter of ink!."

One of R0GUE's key plans is to develop Pop Network as the smart contract deployment entry point of choice in the Polkadot ecosystem, offering a smoother developer experience with reduced complexity, ease of deployment, superior tooling, and best-in-class documentation.

Scio Labs & Aleph Zero part of the picture

Other decentralized entities well-loved within the community will also help drive the development of ink!. They include Scio Labs, which has created the popular ink!athon tool to quickly build an ink! dapp and use-inkathon, a popular frontend library for ink!. Ongoing support will also come from Aleph Zero, a Substrate-based, privacy-enhancing layer 1 blockchain that utilizes ink!.

ink! is an open-source Rust-based smart contract programming language, created and developed by Parity to serve the Polkadot ecosystem, alongside all chains building with the Polkadot SDK. It comes with a clear migration path from smart contract to appchain, but can be used on any other protocol and is interoperable with Solidity contracts.

Its latest upgrade, ink! 5.0.0, features a fresh API, a new and improved testing environment, and support for multiple chain extensions: this empowers developers to build even more sophisticated and advanced contracts for supported chains.

Improvements on the way

Meanwhile, Parity is more committed than ever to improve pallet-contracts as the execution platform of choice for both ink! and Solidity-based smart contracts. The resources freed by handing the ongoing development of ink! to R0GUE will allow us to focus on improving the underlying platform and its Ethereum compatibility.

Parity wants to take this moment to thank all the people inside and outside of our collective for their great contribution and continued support taking ink! forward, and we look forward to seeing what the future holds for Polkadot's original native smart contract language.

You can stay up to date on ink! on the website https://use.ink/ or by following the project on X: @ink_lang.

The ink! repositories have been moved to a new GitHub organization: https://github.com/use-ink. If you were using links to the paritytech GitHub organization, you should adapt them.