Program Deployment

Path 1: governed runtime upgrades (native pallets)

Adding or changing native functionality means adding to or modifying a pallet in the runtime's Rust source, then shipping the result as a new compiled WASM runtime blob. That blob is proposed through EmpoorioChain's on-chain governance process; once approved, it activates for every account on the network simultaneously via system.setCode (or the scheduled equivalent), without anyone redeploying anything per application.

This is a fundamentally different security and operations model from Ethereum's or other chains' "anyone can deploy new code at any time": adding new on-chain logic on EmpoorioChain requires governance approval, not just a signed transaction and a fee.

Path 2: Solidity via the EVM pallet

For a permissionless, per-app deployment workflow closer to Ethereum's, EmpoorioChain's built-in EVM compatibility pallet (pallet-evm + pallet-ethereum, part of the Frontier stack, compiled in by default) lets you deploy Solidity contracts using standard Ethereum tooling — Hardhat, Foundry, ethers.js/viem — pointed at EmpoorioChain's EVM-JSON-RPC endpoint, the same way you would on any EVM-compatible chain. Contracts deployed this way follow the familiar Ethereum immutable-unless-proxied model.

contract Counter {
  int private count = 0;
  function incrementCounter() public {
    count += 1;
  }
  function getCount() public view returns (int) {
    return count;
  }
}

What doesn't work yet: ink!/WASM contracts

EmpoorioChain's runtime declares pallet-contracts as a dependency behind a vm-wasm feature flag that is on by default in the workspace configuration. This can look like ink!/WASM smart contracts are supported. They are not, as of this writing:

• There is no Contracts: entry in the compiled construct_runtime! block, and no impl pallet_contracts::Config for Runtime anywhere in the runtime source.
• The runtime ships a custom WASM VM adapter whose own methods return an explicit "not supported" error for contract load, instantiate, and execute calls — the project's own source comments confirm this adapter does not execute WASM contract bytecode. (An earlier version of this adapter had a real bug where it silently reported success for every WASM contract call without executing anything or charging gas; that bug was fixed as part of a security remediation pass, and the adapter now correctly fails instead of faking success.)

Until pallet-contracts is actually wired into the compiled runtime with a real configuration, treat any claim of working ink!/WASM contract deployment on EmpoorioChain as false, regardless of what the dependency list in Cargo.toml suggests.

Summary