RiB Newsletter #11 – The Flourishing Spring

May 06, 2020

Welcome to the #11 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #10.

Wow, it was a huge month for blockchain Rust! It seems like we’ve all been productive sitting at home hacking. We’ve seen so many interesting developments, hopefully we captured them all in this report. Really, it has been overwhelming trying to pull together all the content and contributions this month. It’s amazing!

There were significant developments for several Rust blockchain projects:

NEAR launched their mainnet. Congrats to the NEAR team!
The Ethereum 2.0 “Schlesi” multi-client testnet launched, with the Rust lighthouse client participating.
Facebook’s Libra resurfaced with a new roadmap and whitepaper.
MobileCoin, a fast and privacy-focused payment network associated with Signal, open-sourced their Rust codebase. MobileCoin runs the Stellar consensus protocol in SGX enclaves, combined with CryptoNote ring signatures.

We learned of new, or new-to-us Rust blockchain and crypto projects:

BLAKE3, a new BLAKE-family hash function, with a Rust implementation.
Distaff, a STARK VM that runs encrypted computations.
Crypto.com Chain, a new chain using Tendermint consensus.
Both IPFS and FileCoin have ongoing Rust implementations: ipfs-rust and forest.
Komodo’s AtomicDEX, seemingly one of the most functional implementations of cross-chain atomic swaps, is written in Rust (or is being rewritten in Rust).

Virtual conferences have been flourishing. There were at least three online blockchain conferences, the materials for which should be available:

Ready Layer One. NEAR, Polkadot, Solana, Nervos, and Oasis represented.
DeFi Discussions. Not Rust-specific, though lots of talks, and Enigma is represented.
Sub0. A Substrate conference.

Encouraging things are happening in the Rust security and cryptography space. The RustSec project has been accelerating, releasing 5 Rust-related security advisories in April; and the RustCrypto organization released new secp256k1 curve implementations and ed25519 signature implementations, among others. This and other activity we’ve seen recently from the Rust secure code working group has been encouraging and exciting.

This was also a big month for RiB. Lots of people submitted news and project updates. Thank you so much! It really improves the quality and breadth of our project coverage.

We now have automation to collect project stats from GitHub (the “merged PR’s” etc. listed for each project, and the “Most Active Projects” section). This will help us reduce the effort that goes into producing each newsletter, and as a result we no longer need help collecting those stats (we do though very much need help choosing important news, blogs, pulls, and issues for each project).

Since our project coverage has become quite expansive, this month we have moved the “Interesting Things” section in front of “Project Updates”. This section contains links about cross-cutting topics that we hope are of interest to the broadest technical Rust audience. We expect this section to expand in the future to cover subjects like cryptography, security, consensus, WASM and other VMs, and crypto-economics, particularly as related to Rust and the Rust blockchain ecosystem.

Let us know what you think in the telegram group. Let’s have another great month, Rusty crypto hackers.

Thanks

This edition of RiB was produced with contributions from Anais Urlichs, Calvin Lau, Daniel Karzel, James Waugh, mfaulk, Paulii Good, SeungMin Lee, Tony Arcieri, Brian Anderson, and Aimee Zhu. Thank you for your help!

RiB needs help to keep up with Rust blockchain projects. If you follow a particular project, or otherwise find information that is beneficial to the Rust & blockchain community, please contribute to the next issue. Either submit a PR to the #12 draft, or Tweet @rust_blockchain.

Project Spotlight

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

The k256 crate!

This is a pure-Rust implementation of secp256k1, the elliptic curve used by Bitcoin and many other blockchain projects. It was one of several cryptography projects announced this month by Tony Arcieri, a maintainer of the RustCrypto GitHub org, and leader of the Rust secure code working group.

In addition to k256, RustCrypto also released p256, an implementation of the NIST P-256 curve, signature, a crate for generically verifying cryptographic signatures, and ed25519, an implementation of the Ed25519 signature scheme.

See the announcments of k256 and p256 and signature and ed25519 for more links and commentary.

Interesting Things

Project: Introducing Distaff: a STARK-based VM written in Rust
Project: BLAKE3. There’s another BLAKE hash! Rust implementation available.
Project: Parity’s ink to write smart contracts
Project: riemann-rs. Simple UTXO transactions in Rust.
Project: p256 and k256 crates and signature and ed25519. Rust implementations of the elliptic curves by the RustCrypto org.
Project: rust-vyper. An implementation of the Vyper smart-contract language.
Report: Analyzing Developers in Cryptocurrency Projects
Blog: When Tailwinds Vanish
Blog: Gitcoin Grants Round 5 Retrospective. Vitalik Buterin analyzes efforts to crowd-fund Ethereum projects. Not Rust-related, but interesting analysis about sustainable community development.
Blog: Crypto Fund II. Andreeessen Horowitz announced $500-million in available crypto-related funding. Not Rust.