Rust in Blockchain Newsletter #5

November 07, 2019

Welcome to the #5 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest combination of technologies. Previous: #4.

The highlight this month was San Francisco Blockchain Week. This was a huge series of events, with representation from a number of Rust blockchain projects. Several projects, Interledger, Near, Nervos, Oasis, and Parity came together for a day of Rust in Blockchain workshops.

That wasn’t the only big event in October though. DevCon in Tokyo also included several Rust blockchain projects, from which several of Parity’s talks are linked below.

Project spotlight

Each month we like to shine a light on a notable Rust blockchain project. This month that project is…

Interledger!

Interledger is a protocol for transacting across multiple blockchains: it is a network of blockchain networks. It has been live since 2017 and currently interoperates with XRP and ETH. It was originally developed in JavaScript but has recently been rewritten in Rust.

Read “How to Interconnect All Blockchains and Value Networks” for an overview of Interledger.

Project updates

Enigma

Blog: Enigma technical resource index. A collection of up-to-date resources about developing for Enigma.
Blog: Secret contracts: Now new and improved!

Grin

Near

Nervos CKB

News: Nervos CKB Development Update #22. Version 0.24.0. New RFC PR#142 describing deposit and withdrawal transactions in the Nervos DAO.
News: Nervos CKB Security Audit Complete
News: Bug Bounty
News: Mining Competition Round 5
News: BTC.com Open Source CKB Mining Pool
News: A Decentralized Mainnet Launch for Nervos CKB
PR: Use molecule to serialize witnesses by @jjyr
PR: Resolved uncles hash calculation issue by @quake
PR: Adapt to 2-phase Nervos DAO implementation by @xxuejie
Video: Nervos CKB bringing back GPU Mining?! Dual Mine Ethereum and CKB
Video: Nervos CKB and the Multi-asset, Store of Value Security Model
Blog: Introduction to CKB Script Programming 4: WebAssembly on CKB
Blog: Introduction to CKB Script Programming 5: Debugging
Blog: Let’s Build a Minimal Blockchain 1: Dawn
Nervos CKB Development Update
Nervos Community Update

Oasis

Blog: CHURP: Dynamic-committee proactive secret sharing.
The tutorials gained two new examples: dice-game and rock-paper-scissors.

Parity

Summary: Parity had many talks at the events this month, and videos for some are available. The first Polkadot network, Kusama, launched. Substrate continues to be under heavy development, with 198 PRs landed in October.

Video: Toward backward compatible Ethereum upgrades. Wei Tang, from DevCon.

Substrate

Blog: Gather: A decentralized alternative to meetup.com built on substrate
Blog: SubRogue. A blockchain Rogue-like game built with Substrate.
Blog: People of Parity: Benjamin Kampmann
Podcast: Mentorship and Values in Open-Source Development. Another interview w/ Ben Kampmann.
PR: Substrate EVM. Run Ethereum contracts on Substrate.
Video: Building Ethereum 2.0 on Substrate. Wei Tang, from DevCon.

Polkadot

News: Announcement of Polkadot ecosystem fund
Blog: How to create and manage a new DAppNode package (with Polkadot). DAppNode is a tool for managing decentralized infrastructure.
Video: Polkadot’s Data Availability and Validity Scheme: An Approach to Security at Scale . Alistair Stewart, from DevCon.
News: Kusama network is live. Kusama is the first live Polkadot network.
Video: Intro to Nominated Proof of Stake.
Video: The Tip of the Polkadot R&D Iceberg. Rob Habermeier. Web3 Summit.
News: Polkadot runs its first Substrate-based parachain

Solana

Summary: Solana development is strikingly active, landing 403 PRs in October. They are renaming their runtime to “sealevel” as part of an effort to make their code reusable by other projects.

Blog: Inside Solana’s internal scalability test.
Blog: A blockchain dilemma: chain forks, catastrophic re-orgs, and insurance.
Podcast: No Sharding #8: Censorship Free Companies on Chain. Unstoppable Domains Founder Brad Kam
PR: Rename solana-runtime to sealevel. Part of an effort to make the solana runtime embeddable by other projects. Note that it has been temporarily reverted due to infrastructure issues.
PR: Make executable, vote, and stake accounts rent-exempt
PR: Add vest program
PR: Implement nightly performance tests
PR: Add solana-ledger crate

Challenges

Nervos Bug Bounty

RFP - Minimal parachain development kit

Learning

Podcast (in Chinese): ForkIt: chat with Tang Wei from Parity and Xiao Xuejie from Nervos

Interesting Things

Ferris Fencing: An eternal duel between programmable crabs with swords. It is a showcase of CKB-VM, a simple implementation of the RISC-V instruction set, written in the Rust programming language.

Reddit discussion on Rust & Blockchain