ink!
Smart Contract Standard
Foundation
Links
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
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
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