ink!

Smart Contract Standard

Rust-based embedded domain-specific language (eDSL) for writing WebAssembly smart contracts on Substrate/Polkadot chains, offering Rust's type safety and tooling for the pallet-contracts environment.

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Details

License https://github.com/use-ink/ink
Dev Status 💀 Defunct
Dev Status Detail Discontinued — development formally ended January 2026; repository locked
Owner Originally Parity Technologies; transferred to ink! Alliance (use-ink organization); discontinued January 2026 due to lack of funding
Governing Body ink! Alliance (use-ink organization) — DISCONTINUED January 2026 due to lack of funding; originally Parity Technologies
Country Germany (Parity Technologies HQ)
Start Year 2018
Stack Rust (eDSL via procedural macros); WebAssembly (compilation target); pallet-contracts (Substrate runtime module)
Funding Parity Technologies (primary); Web3 Foundation grants; Polkadot Treasury (inkubator initiative); Interchain Foundation-adjacent ecosystem support
Last Investigated Mar 9, 2026

Topology view

This tool in the centre and the things it is directly related to. Each line names the kind of relationship.

Topology view: ink!This tool in the centre and the things it is directly related to. Each line names the kind of relationship.ink!CosmWasm (Based on)CosmWasmPolkadot (Built on)Polkadot

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Use Case Domains

Platform Evolution & Sovereignty

Affordances

Self-hostable

Smart Contract Standard Attributes

Origins Created by Parity Technologies alongside Substrate as the native smart contract language for Polkadot parachains; designed to provide Rust's correctness guarantees for Wasm-based contracts, avoiding Solidity's pitfalls; Polkadot's pivot to EVM compatibility in 2025-2026 redirected resources away from ink!
Data Formats Rust structs and enums for contract storage and messages; Borsh serialization for scale-encoded data; JSON for metadata; SCALE codec for on-chain encoding
Terms Apache 2.0
Funds Unknown; Parity internal R&D budget; no discrete public figure; Polkadot Treasury inkubator funded select projects using ink!
Based On Substrate pallet-contracts (runtime environment); influenced by Solidity design but Rust-native; ERC-20/ERC-721 concepts ported as CW-style patterns
Permissions Permissioned by parachain governance; open deployment on parachains that enable pallet-contracts; deposit required per contract
Development Tools cargo-contract (build, test, deploy CLI); drink! (lightweight local testing); DRink! (TUI-based chainless dev tool); rust-analyzer and Clippy (native Rust tooling); Contracts UI (browser-based deployment)
Protocol Maturity / Standardization Mature for its ecosystem; reached ink! 5.x before discontinuation; never achieved broad adoption comparable to Solidity or CosmWasm
Trust Framework Substrate runtime-level trust; contract owner patterns; no built-in reputation layer; pallet-contracts enforces storage deposit as spam prevention
Target Application Domain DeFi on Polkadot parachains, cross-parachain dApps, gaming, NFTs (PSP-34 standard), DAO tooling — all now in question following discontinuation
Deployment Model Per-contract Wasm blob stored on-chain; re-instantiation from same code hash; storage deposit model
Standard Type Composability Standard (smart contract language / framework)
Ecosystem Polkadot

Relationships

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