Decentralized Futures: Introducing Play on Polkadot (POP)

The Web3 Foundation is delighted to announce that Pop has been awarded a Decentralized Futures grant to build an all-in-one CLI development tool for Polkadot. This exciting new project by R0GUE is set to revolutionize the developer experience within the Polkadot ecosystem, making it easier than ever to build and deploy dApps and parachains.

Redefining Developer Onboarding with Pop

Pop addresses a significant pain point within the Polkadot ecosystem: the complex and often discouraging developer onboarding process. By providing a comprehensive toolkit, Pop CLI simplifies the creation, testing, and deployment of parachains and smart contracts through simple commands. This innovative tool aims to streamline and harmonize the entire development experience, offering:

• Developer-Friendly Toolkit: Pop provides up-to-date parachain templates, facilitating easy pallet creation and installation, and offers useful mechanisms for on-demand parachains, empowering developers to kickstart their projects swiftly.
• Comprehensive Testing Environment: Utilizing tools such as try-runtime, and Zombienet, Pop delivers a robust testing environment, enabling efficient and thorough testing processes.
• Seamless Smart Contract Development: Pop supports ink! smart contract development, allowing developers to create new contracts from a suite of starter-templates and deploy them with ease.

Meet the R0GUE Team

R0GUE is a skilled and diverse team deeply rooted in the Polkadot ecosystem. Their firsthand experience with the challenges and opportunities in Polkadot development positions them uniquely to deliver a solution like Pop. Having built pallets, parachains, ink! smart contracts, oracle integrations, precompiles, chain extensions and more. In addition to contributing to notable projects such as Watr, BCG, actively maintaining Paseo and more, showcasing their expertise and dedication to advancing the Polkadot ecosystem.

Future Plans and Vision

Looking ahead, Pop aims to become the de facto tool for Polkadot developers. The roadmap includes expanding functionalities to support a wider range of development needs and integrating with other ecosystem projects. Key milestones include:

• MVP (Minimum Viable Product): Establishing the local environment for Polkadot, initiating customizable parachain projects, and providing a variety of diverse templates for developers to choose from.
• Milestone 1: Enhancing local testing functionality enabling easy launch of parachain networks, as well supporting the scaffolding and deployment of ink! smart contracts. Launch a local Polkadot network in seconds.
• Milestone 2: Focusing on more advanced features, including wallet-integrations for secure-signing from the command line, interactive transacting for both contracts and parachains, as well making onboarding parachains and consuming on-demand coretime seamless.
• Milestone 3: Expanding parachain support by supporting easily adding FRAME pallets into a runtime, assisting with the parachain update process, and further integration with testing and release readiness tools such as try-runtime and benchmarking.
• Ecosystem Support: Through supporting a growing set of templates and tools from other ecosystem contributors. This includes ink! starter-templates as well as audited parachain-templates from OpenZeppelin. More templates from ecosystem teams will continue to be added. Keep an eye out!

Join the Journey

For more information about Pop and their mission to redefine Polkadot development, visit their website or follow them on GitHub. Or join their Telegram to connect​​.