Rust in Blockchain Newsletter #7

January 02, 2020

Welcome to the #7 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #6.

This month we see a trend, in blockchain and across the Rust ecosystem, of projects quickly picking up stable async/await support and migrating to tokio 0.2.

For those interested in a great overview of the future distributed-web landscape, Kyle Samani of Multicoin Capital published a new edition of their “The Web3 Stack”. Not Rust-specific, but an evocative, illustrated, piece describing their vision of what a distributed world-wide-web, built on blockchain technology, could look like.

Rust in Blockchain has been expanding our coverage steadily over the months, and this month we begin covering Zcash, and COMIT.

With so many Rust blockchain projects of note it is increasingly challenging to report on all of them. If you are a passionate observer of any Rust blockchain project we need your help to gather the monthly updates. Please contact us on the Telegram group, or email us directly at [email protected] if you are willing to donate an hour of your time each month.

Happy blockchain new year, Rustaceans!

Project spotlight

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

Zebra.

Zebra is an implementation of Zcash in Rust. It also appears to be the future of Zcash.

Originally developed by Parity, based off their bitcoin client, for the Zcash Foundation, Zebra was announced in July 2019. In late August development was begun from scratch, to take advantage of modern Rust idioms, to divorce the design from that of bitcoin, and to use a different license. The current version of Zebra is developed by Deirdre Connolly and Henry de Valence (who also co-authors a number of high-profile Rust cryptography libraries).

So now there are two Rust implementations of Zcash, including parity-zcash (which presumably inherits the original Zebra codebase).

According to the Zcash Foundation roadmap, in the future Zebra will be “the bedrock of our engineering output”. So it seems like Zcash is all-in on Rust!

Rust is awesome for blockchain, y’all.

Most Active in December

Solana: 343 merged PRs, 88 closed issues.

Parity: 192 merged PRs (1, 2), 69 closed issues (1, 2).

COMIT: 113 merged PRs (1, 2), 40 closed issues (1, 2).

NEAR: 61 merged PRs, 18 closed issues.

News: Nervos Roadmap 2020
News: Our Investment in Nervos
News: ABC Wallet supports CKB!
News: RFC: Nervos Ecosystem Grants Program
News: Nervos CKB Development Update #26. CKB v0.26.1 has released; Released Neuron v0.26.0 bundle with embedded CKB node; Released alpha version Golang SDK.
News: CKB Developer AMA #1 with Tannr
Blog: Nervos’s Multi-Layer Architecture: Designed with Scalability in Mind
Blog: The LatAm Community: a Growing Force in Blockchain
Blog: Understanding the Nervos DAO and Cell Model
Blog: How Nervos CKB Could Facilitate Non-Fungible Tokens
Blog: The Smart Contract Risk in DeFi
Video: How To Stake Nervos CKBytes | CKB DAO Tutorial
Video: How To Mine Nervos CKB | No More GPU Mining - FPGA Mining Tutorial & Staking
PR: Informational: CKB Transaction Structure by @doitian
PR: Doc: add W^X Memory and exec syscall for CKB VM by @xxuejie

Oasis

8 merged PRs (1, 2), 0 closed issues (1, 2).

News: Join the Oasis DevAccelerator Program
Blog: What is My Data Worth? An article by Ruoxi Jia that discusses methods proposed in our recent AISTATS and VLDB papers that attempt to answer this question in the machine learning context.
Blog: Developer Spotlight: Matt Johnson

Parity

192 merged PRs (1, 2), 69 closed issues (1, 2).

News: Polymesh — Flexibility through Smart Extensions. Polymath and Parity collaborate on extending Substrate to provide rich interoperability between base layer runtime modules, and dynamically deployed smart contracts.
News: The Foundation of a New Internet. A look at Web 3.0 with Polkadot — Cornell Blockchain.
News: Kusama Upgrade Bulletin. Kusama is about to get a new logic core. Runtime version: 1031; Supported natively by Polkadot v0.7.10.
News: We are planning to move Parity Ethereum to a DAO ownership & maintainer model. OpenEthereum will provide the basis for cross-org collaboration to ensure the codebase gets the attention it needs to realize its full potential.
News: PolkaWorld Interview House to feature guest speakers and A look at Web 3.0 with Polkadot
News: The Inspiration Behind Web3 Grant Winner Attic Lab’s Substrate Plugin
Blog: Have a TEE with Polkadot
Blog: Polkadot 2019
Blog: Secure and Decentralized Polkadot Domain Name System
Blog: Polkadot Consensus Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: GRANDPA, Part 3: BABE, Part 4: Security.
Video: Sub0.1: Substrate Ecosystem Overview - Fredrik Harryson
Video: Participating in Kusama with Logan Saether
Podcast: How can non money tokens accrue value in crypto | Jack Platt, Polkadot.
Repo: substrate-client-cli. Example command line utility for querying latest state from a substrate based chain.
Slides: Plasm Network at Sub0.1. Plasm Network slide deck at Sub0.1. The Plasm team describes what they are working on and what they will implement on Plasm Network.

Solana

343 merged PRs, 88 closed issues.

Zcash

28 merged PRs (1, 2), 12 closed issues (1, 2).

The news this month is dominated by a poll on how to fund future Zcash development.

Blog: ZF Grants 2.0. Zcash loves Rust. Zcash has grants.
Blog: Zcash developers update 12-6-19
News: Cryptocurrency 101 in the Bronx. From The New Yorker.
News: Zcash Foundation update November 21 - December 13, 2019
Blog: Blossom upgrade improves speed, scalability, and compatibility
Blog: Community sentiment polling results. Results of polling the community on funding future Zcash development.
Blog: Supporting a path for NU4. More about funding.
Blog: Presenting a modified ZIP 1012. More about funding. ZIP 1012 is the proposal to continue funding Zcash.
Blog: ECC response to Zcash community polling. On the future of Zcash funding.
Blog: Dev Funds Should Be in Zcash, not United States Dollars. From the Electric Coin Company re the recent funding proposal.
Blog: ECC transparency report for Q2 2019
PR: Update transaction definition
PR: Use redjubjub types in zebra-chain. redjubjub is another Zcash Rust project, part of the Zcash protocol.
PR: Upgrade tokio, futures, hyper to released versions. Zebra is async/await.
PR: Add ZIP 1014, based on ZIP 1012. An updated funding ZIP.

Learning

The Web3 Stack, 2019 Edition. Updates the Web3 stack based on the 2018 edition.

Interesting Things

Mark Zuckerberg has a big Libra problem by Gavin Wood. Libra is too closely tied to megacorporations to succeed. Platforms built to be open and free will outperform Libra.

Hold Tight, Here Come the Blockchain Wars by Gavin Wood.