Pop CLI: An All-in-one Tool for Polkadot Development
Beneficiary:Pop CLI was initiated in late 2023 by R0GUE, a team of ex-Parity engineers deeply experienced with the Polkadot ecosystem. Recognizing the complexity and fragmentation faced by developers, the team identified a critical need for an all in one tool for Polkadot Development. In mid-2024, Pop CLI received a Decentralized Futures grant from the Web3 Foundation, evolving into a production-grade tool with strong ecosystem adoption (read the full story).
“Collaborating with the R0GUE team was highly positive—the robust documentation, user-friendly Pop CLI, and excellent support to deploying teams were consistently impressive.” — Web3 Foundation
The Pop CLI supports the full development lifecycle for both Polkadot chains and smart contracts. It features secure transaction signing, integration and partnership with the Polkadot Deployment Portal (PDP), integration with OpenZeppelin and includes advanced features for testing, benchmarking and much more. More recently it has been recognised in Polkadot's documentation.
This proposal seeks funding to further enhance Pop CLI's functionality, usability, and infrastructure. Specifically, funding will support local network bootstrapping with live state, full-stack starter kits and OmniNode integration, state query functionality, AI integration, contract verification, continuous maintenance and UX improvements, and focused developer education, distribution and community collaboration.
You can review all the details of the proposal in the following Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jdfnwWAW4EIBu2UFiXmFry1NXTu3QO20lkjjVpF_4q4
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Change Log
Section: AI integration
Date: 30-06-25
In response to feedback from 0xTaylor (at KusDAO), we’ve made updates to clarify and strengthen our approach to AI integration in the Pop CLI. While our original proposal emphasised a single-prompt interface, we agree that this alone doesn’t reflect how developers actually want to work. We had already been exploring more flexible options, including conversational interaction and the use of an MCP server. These changes clarify our intent to support both modes of interaction and to lay the foundation for more powerful, agentic AI workflows.
IMPORTANT: Nothing has changed in terms of the total amount of time needed and thus the costs.
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Go R0GUE
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Before Pop CLI was a thing, I usually thought to myself: "We need a CLI to scaffold parachains". Developers are extremely used to using CLIs for creating projects. Web developers use them all the time, especially for frontends with javascript but also for backends with tools such as rails or django. If we want to make Polkadot more appealing to developers outside of Web3, if we want to make it easy for developers to build on Polkadot, then a CLI is a great way of doing so. Pop CLI filled that need and it did so with impressive features like
pop callfor interacting with chains and signing via the browser and scaffolding smart contracts as well.The objectives mentioned in the proposal align with the vision of making Polkadot friendlier and more accessible to developers. Being able to spawn mock networks with the state from live chains already filled in will be a huge win for new developers wanting to test their project. Frontend templates make it very appealing as a "fullstack" CLI, pushing the adoption of the latest and greatest, like PAPI. I was initially intrigued by the usage of AI in the proposal but after reading it, I think it makes a lot of sense, as long as the user is prompted to accept the generated command before executing it :P
Pop CLI, PDP, chopsticks, zombie-byte, papi, polkavm, we really are witnessing a new generation of tools to build on Polkadot that make it easier than ever before.
Props to the team!
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