RiB Newsletter #12 – ZK-Rustups

June 03, 2020

Welcome to the #12 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #11.

This month, what strikes us most is the proliferation of Rust cryptography, and especially zero-knowledge proof, projects. Even blockchains that aren’t primarily implemented in Rust are increasingly looking to Rust for their crypto. So many of these are springing up that we’ve lost track, so we spent some time doing a survey of the world of Rust crypto and zero-knowledge proofs, and what we found kind of blew us away! For Rust blockchain developers there are an overwhelming number of choices for their crypto building blocks. Here are some of them.

Rust-crypto-specific GitHub orgs
- rustcrypto: lots of well-maintained, basic crypto primitives and abstractions
- dalek-cryptography: mature ed25519 and zkp implementations
- zkcrypto maintains a number of zero-knowledge crates used by multiple projects, bellman, ff, pairing, group, jubjub, bls12_381.
- SCIPR Lab has several zero-knowledge Rust projects, zexe, for decentralized private computation (paper), poly-commit, for polynomial commitments, marlin, for the Marlin SNARK (paper), and ripp, for proofs of inner pairing products (paper)
- KZen-networks is another organization filled with Rust crypto, dedicated to threshold cryptography, multi-party-ecdsa, curv, multi-party-schnorr, class, white-city, and more.
Non-Rust blockchains using Rust for security and other purposes
- 0xProject/OpenZKP. A ZKP implementation by 0x Network.
- algorand/pointproofs. An implementation of Algorand’s Pointproofs: Aggregating Proofs for Multiple Vector Commitments (paper).
- Stellar has a separate Rust blockchain, Slingshot, built on a zero-knowledge VM, ZkVM, and containing several other interesting in-tree Rust crypto projects.
- dusk-network, a blockchain written in Go, has multiple Rust crypto projects, phoenix, a ZK transaction model, Poseidon252, a hash function, and many more. It apears that they support smart contracts written in Rust.
- Golem. A decentralized computation network for Ethereum with a large number of Rust projects, including gMorph, a homomorphic encryption library, and several WASM-related projects. Their yagna project is a new implementation in Rust with a different approach from the original project.
- Tendermint, another Go blockchain, also has many Rust crypto and security projects.
- Komodo, uses Rust for their cross-chain AtomixDEX matchmaking network.
- IOTA is developing some new projects in Rust.
- Input-Output HK, contributors to Cardano and Ethereum Classic, have multiple Rust projects in Rust, including jormungandr, a Rust blockchain that appears to be an implementation of Cardano in Rust.
- The Ethereum community has many projects in Rust, as does Zcash, and there exist Bitcoin implementations in Rust.

By a rough counting, 13 of the top 50 blockchains by market cap are using Rust in some way, whether primary implementations, alternate or unofficial implementanions, libraries, support code, or research projects. Those projects are: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano, Stellar, Crypto.com, Ethereum Classic, IOTA, Zcash, Ontology, 0x, Algorand, Qtum. While reviewing these it’s notable that while an increasing number of blockchain projects are using Rust, few of the top projects are primarily implemented in Rust (the exception being Crypto.com). Yet, of course.

This month Rust-behemoth Polkadot launched their mainnet. Congrats to Parity and Polkadot contributors.

Thanks

This edition of RiB was produced with contributions from Anais Urlichs, Calvin Lau, Paulii Good, 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 #13 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…

near/core-contracts.

The NEAR project is a blockchain written in Rust, that runs smart contracts written in Rust, on a WASM VM. It’s super-rusty. This recently-released project provides well-documented, well-commented, examples of NEAR Rust contracts written with the NEAR SDK:

It’s a concise look into real-world Rust smart contracts, and real-world, non-browser Rust-on-WASM.

The NEAR developers are interested in any feedback about the experience of writing smart contracts in Rust on NEAR.