Since there’s not much else of note this month, let’s survey a topic that’s been on our minds recently: Rust and smart contracts. There are a number of blockchains that either run smart contracts written in Rust, or implement their smart contract runtimes or languages in Rust.

This month, Oasis launched its mainnet. The Ethereum 2 beacon chain also went live. Parity and NEAR released many good videos. RiB editor Brian keeps documenting his experiments with Rust-based smart contract platforms, and yet another first-impressions post.

Welcome to November, Rust blockchaineers. We hope you’ve been writing some great Rust. Though mostly not Rust-specific, the coolest stuff we’ve got for you this month are a bunch of interesting new papers on blockchain-related topics.

For the last few months we’ve been following new zero-knowledge proof projects in Rust. This month, with Secret Network upgrading their mainnet with secret contracts, it seems like a good opportunity to explore Rust blockchains that are using a completely different privacy-preserving technology: secure enclaves.

Rust blockchain development continued at its typical blistering pace, and again it’s impossible to follow everything going on. This month we see continued advancement in zero-knowledge computing, an obvious focus from the entire blockchain industry on the DeFi phenomenon, and new hackathons with opportunities for Rust developers.

This month, we’re seeing a bunch of interesting Rust blockchain and crypto projects. Elrond, appeared on our radar with the launch of their mainnet. Although not written in Rust, it runs Rust smart contracts on its Arwen WASM VM, which itself is based on the Rust Wasmer VM. Along with NEAR, Nervos, and Enigma (and probably others), this continues an encouraging trend of blockchains enabling smart contracts in Rust.