TLDR;

The purpose of this bounty is to nurture and develop WebAssembly smart contracts on parachains. As Gavin mentioned in this CoinDesk article, WebAssembly is the future of smart contracts. However, even in the Polkadot ecosystem, EVM smart contract is the go-to-market solution now simply because lack of ecosystem toolings and dApps new developers can refer to. To bootstrap the Wasm dApps in the ecosystem, we will fund canary dApps and toolings through this bounty.

Context of This Bounty

Please see this post first. Currently, based on the data, smart contract Parachains are leading the Polkadot ecosystem in terms of market adoption. More projects are deploying dApps on Polkadot Parachains than making Parachains today and this trend will likely continue due to the high resource requirement to deploy a chain. The core problem is that the Polkadot ecosystem only supports EVM at the time of writing this and we are reproducing something which other L1s/L2s can do. One of Polkadot’s main differentiators and default environment is Wasm. In this bounty, we would like to push Wasm smart contracts adoption. The scope is as follows:

1. Create easily accessible and audited ink!/ask! smart contract showcases
2. Create ink!ubator - an incubation program to support community projects built with ink! and parachains that want to expose select APIs through contracts-pallet “chain extensions”. We will also help facilitate a smart contract auditing market.
3. Develop a React hooks library “useInk” - the missing front-end library for Dapps on Polkadot.

Bounty Proposal

Here is the full bounty proposal.

Curators Candidates

Sam Ruberti from Parity Technologies
(Address: 13zqqP37p8HjLuWr7sha9GcAcYiiDgjqoNS3YbSELtgvaAfb): Sam Ruberti is a Senior Rust Developer with ink! and has over twelve years experience delivering full stack products for companies including Bloomberg, Peloton, and Clear, and five years of experience building full-stack Dapps in production environments. He has built microservices, DeFi platforms, NFTs, and contributed to open-source libraries for Ethereum.

Sota Watanabe Astar Foundation (Address: 13VyvkXX3dYyeT7oAmaipZYNHzFJXofC5V8eqMuzd1isXY84):
Sota Watanabe is the founder of Astar Network. He joined the web3 space in 2015 and started developing Astar Network in 2019. Apart from his achievements, he is a director of Japan Blockchain Association and used to be a blockchain researcher at the University of Tokyo and a task force member of Trusted Web led by the Japanese government. In addition to that, he was chosen for Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in the IT division and Forbes 30 Under 30 Japan.

Hernando Castano from Parity Technologies (Address: 15FjwNSxHhaJeknJjbydSo561ti1ea8sf3Y1fA263emujzxW):
Hernando is a Core Developer at Parity Technologies. Hernando joined the blockchain space in 2017, initially curious about the world of smart contracts on Ethereum. In 2019, Hernando joined Parity Technologies to work on the Parity Ethereum client, and has since transitioned to the team working on the ink! programming language.

Markian Ivanichok 727 Ventures (address: 16FVZ2qVefqbr2zcEGVojEQBgx3nb8GqQCdjKiaq2nSs33T8):
Founder & CEO at 727.ventures, Brushfam & Dedali Metaverse. Web3 entrepreneur, Software Engineer. Brushfam onboards businesses to Polkadot WASM. Projects: Openbrush(Openzeppelin of WASM ink!), Typechain for ink!, sol2ink (transpiler from solidity to ink!) and substrate/ink! contribution itself. Also WASM conference, which was the first web3 WASM conference and gathered ~1000 participants.

Hang Yin from Phala Network (address: 12BZFbrNksTKwHtaBojnVtoN8BoXKmBFzT3xDnHh7P9t2Cg5):
Co-founder and CTO at Phala Network. 5 years of Web3 core development and entrepreneur experience. Author of Phala Network Technical Whitepaper. Lead the team to build an off-chain computing protocol based on ink! and Substrate with 30k online servers. Ex-Googler on Machine Learning before joining Web3.

Michał Świętek , Development Lead at Aleph Zero (Address: 5H6AVPSNv8GjEFiDKqhtCd6U494vGMm3r5vkzr5614sbfQnx0) :
For a couple of years, Michał has been fully devoted to the Aleph Zero project. From co-designing novel consensus mechanisms, and writing the first lines of code in core repositories, to the high-level architecture of Aleph Zero node implementation.

Next Steps

• Get feedback from the community
• Make a multisig for this bounty and make it transparent
• Make a bounty official proposal
• Make a GitHub page and guidelines for this bounty.