RiB Newsletter #13 – Stuck inside, hacking away

July 01, 2020

Welcome to the #13 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #12.

It was another month in 2020, like previous months in 2020. Stuck inside, hacking away.

We don’t see a consistent blockchain Rust theme to highlight this month, but interesting new Rust crypto and blockchain projects continue to be launched. They are noted in the “Interesting Things” section.

Oasis launched what will probably become their mainnet. Congrats to them!

Ethereum 2 keeps creeping closer, and it looks like Lighthouse, in Rust, might be the fastest implementation.

The Holochain team asked that we highlight the Holochain DevCamp, running until August 27th. Now is your opportunity to learn more about the project. There are a number of other online blockchain hackathons going on this summer, noted in our “Events” section. Could be a good way to spend time this summer instead of going to the beach.

Well, anyway, keep on hacking.

Thanks

This edition of RiB was produced with contributions from Darosior, James Waugh, Ken Shamir, Paulii Good, Taylor Lee, 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 #14 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…

electrs.

electrs is a server for the Electrum Bitcoin wallet, written in Rust. Electrum is a light wallet that needs to connect to a server to transact with the Bitcoin network. Although there are public Electrum servers, and they are safe to transact with, they can deanonymize users, so it might be prudent to run one’s own Electrum server, like electrs, or bwt (also written in Rust).

As mentioned recently in a blog post, Blockstream, one of the primary Bitcoin developers, uses electrs in its block explorer, esplora, which is live at blockstream.info.

Interesting Things

News

Enigma partners with IBM on “SafeTrace”, a contact tracing app. Enigma is a Rust blockchain with private computation.
Oasis launched The Amber Network, and the new white paper The Oasis Blockchain Platform.
New RustCrypto releases: aead, block-cipher, crypto-mac, digest, signature, stream-cipher, and more!

Blog Posts

Papers

Bulletproofs+. A new paper with improvements to bulletproofs.

Projects

blst. An implementation of BLS12-381. In C, with Rust bindings.
celo-bls-snark-rs. Implements SNARK-friendly BLS signatures over BLS12-377 and BW6-761.
Candid, an interface description language (IDL) for interacting with canisters (also known as services or actors) running on the Internet Computer.
Crate Crypto. Open source cryptographic implementations. Mostly from IACR.
ethcontract-rs. Generate type-safe bindings for interacting with Ethereum contracts.
Neptune. Neptune is a Rust implementation of the Poseidon hash function tuned for Filecoin.
Nervos CKB
- ckb-std contains several modules that help you write CKB contract with Rust.
- ckb-zkp. Zero Knowledge Proofs Toolkit for CKB.
poly-commit. Univariate Polynomial Commitments. A Rust library that implements (univariate) polynomial commitment schemes.
riemann-rs. Bitcoin-oriented dev toolboxes for native and browser apps.
Sigma Rust. Rust implementation of ErgoScript cryptocurrency scripting language.
The Stacks 2.0 blockchain implementation, an open-membership replicated state machine produced by the coordination of a non-enumerable set of peers.
Starcoin. A Layered Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Blockchain System.

Videos

ZkVM: About the motocrab. ZkVM is a zero-knowledge VM created by Stellar.

Most Active in June

Parity : 277 merged PRs (1, 2), 122 closed issues (1, 2), 84 open issues (1, 2)

Solana: 245 merged PRs (1), 26 closed issues (1), 33 open issues (1)

COMIT: 186 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 71 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 15 open issues (1, 2, 3)

NEAR: 90 merged PRs (1), 70 closed issues (1), 45 open issues (1)

Project Updates

Bitcoin

14 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 3 closed issues (1, 2), 5 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

CodeChain

28 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 6 closed issues (1, 2), 2 open issues (1, 2)

PR: Fix a deadlock in miner.rs by @majecty

COMIT

186 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 71 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 15 open issues (1, 2, 3)

PR: Respawn feature by @luckysori
PR: Add herc20-hbit and hbit-herc20 by @da-kami
PR: Clean up storage by @tcharding
PR: Re-export rust-bitcoin from COMIT lib by @luckysori

Crypto.com Chain

73 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 42 closed issues (1), 39 open issues (1)

Holochain

3 merged PRs (1), 0 closed issues, 0 open issues

News: Holochain v0.0.49 released
News: Holochain Dev Pulse 74: Generate Your hApp’s Source Code in Seconds
Video: AMA 38 Let’s Talk Tech!
News: Holochain DevCamp 7
- DevCamp 7 is a month long, community-run, online Holochain developer training program. Get hands on experience building a Holochain App with 2 live sessions every week, coding assignments, and support on our online platform! (all sessions will be recorded and posted)
PR: Experimental REPL for debug purposes by @zippy