Treasury Proposal: ink! Alliance — Enabling Rust Smart Contracts and Developer Growth on Polkadot Hub

Proponent: ink! Alliance (122VRdiHngKqsqqqVvTT2SZ3FN3BRFrupdYRaT7wuoZgkThd, 4/5 multisig)
Date: October 2025
Requested Amount: $538,000 USDC
Category: Core Protocol / Developer Platform (Public Good)
Short description: This proposal enables the critical path for DOT programmability on the Hub for Rust developers. It aims to finalize, audit-remediate, and stabilize ink! v6 on PolkaVM for the Polkadot Hub launch, then drive education, adoption, and developer support for six months (Q4 ’25 → Q1 ’26).

Overview

Polkadot Hub marks the next evolution of Polkadot, introducing dual-VM smart contract support for both EVM and PolkaVM, balancing short-term traction with long-term innovation. While EVM compatibility enables Solidity developers to deploy familiar dApps, PolkaVM represents Polkadot’s technological differentiation: high-performance, RISC-V-based execution, and future compatibility with JAM.

This proposal represents the third Treasury request related to enable ink!, the Rust smart contracts SDK for Polkadot Hub. While a bounty referendum with a longer-term strategic focus is currently under consideration, it may not reach approval in its present form. In parallel, a prior Treasury proposal successfully funded foundational work toward this same objective, and this proposal now seeks to complete that effort in alignment with the upcoming Polkadot Hub launch.

As an ecosystem we should prioritise our native technology and innovations to enable strategic advantages through differentiation and not mere imitation. ink! is the only language currently capable of bringing PolkaVM to market in 2025, begin testing it for JAM, and enable a market size of 5.1+ million Rust developers to use DOT programmatically in their applications. When smart contracts are enabled on Hub in December 2025, Solidity contracts will be deployed to the EVM side of it. For the unique strength of Polkadot – PolkaVM – there is no viable solution besides ink!.

ink! provides a secure, native Rust environment built directly on the Polkadot SDK, enabling developers to build advanced, composable, and cross-chain applications that leverage Polkadot’s unique interoperability through XCM.

This proposal funds the final push to bring ink! v6 to production, a release that will both showcase Polkadot’s unique technical edge and expand its developer base.

In terms of adoption, ink! v6 continues to see strong usage on the Hub’s testnet in relation to Solidity even though it is only in beta, with almost 1/3 of all smart contracts on PAsset Hub being deployed in ink! and 36% of all accounts related to ink!.

ink! also sees strong web traffic stats in terms of interest relative to the wider ecosystem. In addition to direct engagement on Telegram totalling 1237 messages and 71 active participants in the past 6 months.

Results from the Web3 Summit Hackathon in July ‘25, with ink! significantly taking the lead in terms of smart contract developer interest and hackathon project submissions:

Source: WebZero

This 6-month proposal funds the critical path to take ink! out of beta, into production and build traction on the Hub:

• Audit remediation & stable release of ink! v6 on PolkaVM.
• Tooling, docs, benchmarks, and ergonomics improvements.
• Education (examples, guides, videos, campaigns).
• Community support (teams building on the Hub; hackathons).

How can we contact the ink! alliance?

The best way is to join the ink! Telegram room: https://t.me/inkathon, this gives access to the ink! alliance members. For a direct contact, you may contact Peter directly: https://t.me/petras99.

Full Proposal & Note on Prior Bounty Proposal

The full proposal can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zAFK7JgGgn2HbEbcXPDl53mT-KC6WQ-aoehYVl8ww7A

We previously opened a proposal to create an ink! Alliance Bounty. However, after listening to feedback, we have created this proposal returning us to milestone based and half the price.