Dear Ontology supporters and technical community members,

It has already been one month since we open-sourced the first batch of Ontology projects and we have received enthusiastic response and feedback from developers and the greater community.

On April 25 we released Ontology v0.7 and TestNet Polaris. This update includes a new CLI function, WebSocket subscribe function, event push filter, new Wasm APIs, smart contract pre-execute, interoperability across VMs, NeoVM v0.7, SmartX, and more.

The market has already recognized the functionality and application prospects of smart contracts, but there are nevertheless limitations. Ordinary users are unable to effectively develop radical products and services due to limitations in programming languages and tools, which results in excessive costs for application developers. SmartX was born to solve these problems.

SmartX (http://smartx.ont.io/) is a one-stop IDE that can be used to compile, deploy, and invoke smart contracts. It provides a range of smart contract templates and a powerful online editor. Individuals can use SmartX templates or commission community developers to customize contracts. In the future, smart contract developers will be able to trade smart contracts they have written or collaborate with multiple people to develop smart contracts, using their own expertise to profit.

Ontology smart contracts support multiple contract types such as native smart contracts, NeoVM smart contracts, Wasm smart contracts, and more. Currently, SmartX supports NeoVM-based C# and Python, and will support Wasm online compilation functions and additional mainstream programming languages in the future, including Java, Rust, Go, JavaScript, and more.

In the future SmartX will work like GitHub to be a distributed software project code hosting platform. This will support multiple people to participate in and share complex contracts, and at the time same, implement a set of economic incentives and integrate fair governance policies to reflect the contributions of each participant. This will foster smart contract writing, smart contract transactions, collaboration, community building, and an altogether valuable smart contract development ecosystem.

SmartX has just set foot on its development path. We welcome the developer community to give feedback and even actively participate in its development. We hope the community can provide more development and operation suggestions, and will jointly develop modules, functions, and interfaces to create a rich smart contract development ecosystem.

Thank you for your continued support,

The Ontology Team