RiB Newsletter #14 – Are We Smart (Contract) Yet?

August 05, 2020

Welcome to the #14 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #13.

We’re seeing a bunch of interesting Rust blockchain and crypto projects, so this month the “Interesting Things” section is loaded up with news, papers, and project links.

This month, Elrond, appeared on our radar with the launch of their mainnet. Although not written in Rust, it runs Rust smart contracts on its Arwen WASM VM, which itself is based on the Rust Wasmer VM. Along with NEAR, Nervos, and Enigma (and probably others), this continues an encouraging trend of blockchains enabling smart contracts in Rust. See the “Interesting Things” section for examples of Elrond’s Rust contracts.

Rust continues to be popular for research into zero-knowledge proofs, with Microsoft releasing Spartan, a zk-SNARK system without trusted setup.

In RiB news, we published a late one-year anniversary blog post. It has some reflection on the changes to, and growth of, RiB over the last year.

The Awesome Blockchain Rust project, which is maintained by Sun under the rust-in-blockchain GitHub org, has received a stream of updates recently, and is now published as the Awesome-RiB page on rustinblockchain.org.

It’s a pretty good resource for finding blockchain-related Rust projects, with links to many of the more prominent and mature projects noted in the RiB newsletter. It could use more eyes on it though.

Thanks

This edition of RiB was produced with contributions from Calvin Lau, Darosior, EnforSys, Paulii Good, Sol, Tony Arcieri, Brian Anderson, and Aimee Zhu. Thank you for your help!

Also, Awesome Blockchain Rust has been updated. Thanks to the awesome contributors: Alfredo Garcia, Andy Nogueira, ChainSafe Systems, Lane Rettig, Michael Sproul!

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 #15 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…

ethers.rs

ethers.rs is an Ethereum & Celo library and wallet implementation, implemented as a port of the ethers.js library to Rust.

Ethereum client programming is usually done in JavaScript with either web3.js or ethers.js, with ethers.js being the newer of the two. These clients communicate to an Ethereum node, typically via JSON-RPC (or, when in the browser, via an “injected” client provider that follows EIP-1193, like MetaMask).

ethers.rs then provides a strongly-typed alternative for writing software that interacts with the Ethereum network.

As of now it is only suited for non-browser use cases, but if you prefer hacking in Rust to JavaScript, as some of us surely do, it is worth looking into for your next Ethereum project.

The author of ethers.rs, Georgios Konstantopoulos, accepts donations to sponsor their work.

Note that there is also a Rust alternative to web3.js, rust-web3.

Interesting Things

News

NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Program Enters ‘Selection Round’. Not Rust, but relevant to the future of cryptography.
Rust is now a top 20 language in all of the 5 most major language popularity listings. Looks like we bet on the right horse.
Microsoft open sources Spartan: High-speed zkSNARKs without trusted setup.
Elrond, a sharded blockchain, whose mainnet went live in July, has several Rust projects.
- Tutorial: The Crowdfunding Smart Contract (part 1), (part 2)
- Blog: My first smart contract in Rust on Elrond VM
World’s first practical hardware for zero-knowledge proofs acceleration
From Rust Crypto – The k256 crate (pure Rust secp256k1 elliptic curve implementation) just landed an impressive new scalar/field arithmetic backend inspired by bitcoin-core’s libsecp256k1 Party popper.

Blog Posts

zkPorter: Composable Scalability in L2 Beyond zkRollup. A scaling architecture proposal.
What’s It Good For?. Lane’s take on the blockchain tech: “blockchain is very good at a narrow set of applications and pretty bad at just about everything else. When you get past the hype, it’s really just a slow, expensive, distributed, permissionless, append-only ledger, nothing more and nothing less.”
Distaff VM: approaching Turing-completeness
Hunting down a non-determinism-bug in our Rust Wasm build
NEAR Accounts and Access Keys as Identities for Textile Integration

Papers

Projects

Elrond’s Rust smart contracts:
- elrond-wasm-rs. Rust smart contract library designed for Elrond’s Arwen VM. Also provides a debugging mode with mocks.
- sc-bitswing-rs. BitSwing smart contract by Band Protocol.
- sc-busd-rs. BUSD stablecoin smart contract implementation and tests.
- sc-delegation-rs. Smart contract for managing staking delegation in Elrond.
- sc-dns-rs. Elrond DNS smart contract, written in Rust.
flux-protocol, the open market protocol build on NEAR protocol, is launching their Beta Program. Check their latest Flux Community Update.
Forest. Rust Filecoin Node Implementation.
Graph Node indexes data from blockchains such as Ethereum and serves it over GraphQL.
Minsc, a Miniscript-based scripting language for Bitcoin contracts.
Neptune is a Rust implementation of the Poseidon hash function tuned for Filecoin.
Polymesh. Polymesh is a blockchain for regulated securities and open finance.
Radicle Link. A secure, p2p network for code collaboration. It has many Rust projects under its GitHub organization
rusty-blockparser. Bitcoin Blockchain Parser written in Rust.
rust-fil-proofs. The Filecoin Proving Subsystem (or FPS) provides the storage proofs required by the Filecoin protocol. It is implemented entirely in Rust, as a series of partially inter-dependent crates – some of which export C bindings to the supported API.
Shuffler uses StarkWare’s VeeDo VDF to seed a seedable RNG, and shuffle a randomisable list of items.
SputnikVM: Rust Ethereum Virtual Machine Implementation.
Stacks 2.0 is an open-membership replicated state machine produced by the coordination of a non-enumerable set of peers.
Tezos node/shell in Rust
Yew. Rust / Wasm framework for building client web apps. Perhaps we’ll we writing our dapps completely in Rust soon.
zeroize.rs. Securely zero memory while avoiding compiler optimizations.
ZoKrates. A toolbox for zkSNARKs on Ethereum.
zkSync is a fully trustless, secure, user-centric protocol for scaling payments and smart contracts on Ethereum.