Sol2Ink Milestones 3 & 4 development (WASM smart contracts)

Dear Kusama Community,

We would like to share the proposal for the development of milestones 3 and 4 of Sol2Ink.

You can check the initial discussion here.

The price was calculated by EMA7 rate on the date of proposal submission, so the calculations were the following: 112400 / 2 / 30.082 = 1868.22684662 KSM

TL;DR

This proposal aims to decrease the barrier of entrance for Solidity developers coming into ink!, by further improving our infrastructure product Sol2Ink. As Gavin mentioned in this CoinDesk article, WebAssembly is the future of smart contracts. However, we assume that businesses and developers hesitate to move their products to the Substrate/ink! smart contracts ecosystem because the resources and onboarding time needed for such a transition are just high compared to the potential reward. Sol2Ink decreases the time needed for such a transition rapidly. A transition that could have taken a few months may take a week.

Sol2Ink is our infrastructure product, which transpiles Solidity smart contracts to ink! smart contracts and can be used for businesses to help them with the transition as well as can help seasoned Solidity developers decrease the learning curve of ink! rapidly. This proposal is a continuation of the development of the product while also aiming to expand the ink! market to existing Solidity/EVM markets.

Context

Based on the data, it seems that the Polkadot ecosystem is not fully attractive for existing projects from other ecosystems like Ethereum, Polygon, or other EVM chains. Even though these projects can be massively enhanced by all the features and possibilities available with Polkadot, Substrate, Rust, ink!, and WASM, there is little incentivization to migrate. They have their product working already, large liquidity and user base available, and onboarding to Rust and ink! can be difficult and resource-demanding. We also see that the onboarding layer for Solidity developers is rather high, which is caused by the difference in difficulty between Solidity and Rust programming languages.

Our team at Brushfam is committed to creating a developer-friendly ecosystem for ink! smart contracts in the Polkadot ecosystem. Based on the data, we believe that our products, including OpenBrush, Sol2Ink, and Typechain-Polkadot, have become the starting point for every smart contract developer entering the ecosystem. Sol2Ink specifically aims to lower this entrance threshold by allowing seasoned Solidity developers to easily migrate from Solidity to more complicated Rust and ink!, while also serving the purpose of a learning tool to lower the learning curve.

Proposal

We would like to share our proposal for developing of milestones 3 & 4 of Sol2Ink. Sol2Ink is an infrastructure product used for an easy transition from Solidity to ink!. It aims to lower the entry barrier for businesses to transit from Solidity/EVM to ink!, and to lower the learning curve of ink! for seasoned Solidity developers.

Roadmap

Our roadmap is divided into two parts:

1. Market research and tutorial for Sol2Ink for introduction to the product - our goal is to research the interest for such a product between the Solidity / EVM stakeholders, which will also raise the awareness of the possibility of such an easy transition to a new promising ecosystem. We will also showcase how easy it is to create a full-stack ink! app in a video tutorial, just by providing the original Solidity code base.

2. Upgrade of Sol2Ink focused on the output of fully compilable contracts - currently Sol2Ink can transpile most Solidity code bases in one click, but there is still a need for a developer to check the outcomes since it is a program producing code. Our long-term goal is for Sol2Ink to produce code, where the minimal interference of a developer with the produced code is needed to have a fully ready 1:1 application. The fourth milestone of Sol2Ink is the first step to achieving this goal.

Full Proposal

For more information on our proposal, including a detailed roadmap, please see the following link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13iTUZ7CeBTaPV-141EfJUjiISAniuK0dvNdeVhW-Bks/edit#heading=h.v6is2ta0txr1

Great comment from public discussion. Posting here for reference:
Screenshot 2023-05-03 at 19.21.11

Thank you for your consideration, and we look forward to your support!