RiB Newsletter #15 – Turbofish in the Blocksea
Welcome to the #15 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #14.
Rust blockchain development continued at its typical blistering pace, and again it’s impossible to follow everything going on.
This month we see continued advancement in zero-knowledge computing, an obvious focus from the entire blockchain industry on the DeFi phenomenon, and some new hackathons with opportunities for Rust developers.
Every month seems to bring advancements in zero-knowledge proofs, and new implementations in Rust. It is a research area that will probably impact the general computing industry eventually, and one where the blockchain industry is leading the way, and one where Rust has a huge foothold. Even projects that are not written in Rust we see implementing their zero-knowledge cryptography in Rust. But this stuff is extremely technical, and improving at a rapid pace. We fear we will never understand it.
There are several Rust blockchains now in development that are built around zero-knowledge VMs, whose smart contracts create zero-knowledge proofs:
- Aleo. A new platform with its own zero-knowledge programming language, Leo.
- Slingshot. A research project from Stellar.
- Dusk. Not entirely in Rust.
These are networks that support nearly arbitrary computation over secret inputs. Like programable Zcash.
Speaking of Zcash, the zkSNARK pioneers announced their next-generation zero-knowledge proof system, called Halo 2, which uses a new zkSNARK construction, PLONK.
Two projects built on Rust blockchains launched this month: Serum, a decentralized exchange built on Solana; and Flux, a prediction market built on NEAR. Soon Secret Network launches their mainnet.
Finally, Mozilla laid off all but one of its full-time Rust employees. There are a few other people left at Mozilla who actively contribute to Rust as part of their role in Firefox, but this mostly ends Mozilla’s commitment to Rust’s development.
There’s no need to worry though. Rust was designed to outlive Mozilla’s withdrawal, and the project will continue nearly unaffected.
Thanks
This edition of RiB was produced with contributions from Andrew Miller, Calvin Lau, James Waugh, Jane Wu, Kevin McCloskey, Paulii Good, Taylor Lee, Moonbeam, Fluence, Brian Anderson, and Aimee Zhu. Thank you for your help!
And thanks to the Awesome Blockchain Rust contributor Matt Bell!
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 #16 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…
This is a blockchain with built-in software license management. We’re excited about this because license management is a rare non-currency use case for blockchains that makes a lot of sense. While we might expect to see more blockchain platforms devoted solely to digital licensing, fluence is actually a complete distributed computing platform, with a unique vision about using license management to generate profit from open source software.
Interesting Things
News
- James Waugh shared big news from Secret Network.
Privacy-preserving smart contracts are going live on Secret Network Tuesday, September 15! Now developers can build and deploy “secret contracts” with encrypted inputs, outputs, and state.
- Welcome to Aleo. Aleo is a new blockchain that runs a zero-knowledge VM, targetted by their own zero-knowledge programming language.
- Buggy code knocks OpenEthereum clients offline. OpenEthereum is the Rust Ethereum client formerly developed by Parity. Its development has noticably slowed recently, and it would be a shame for this Geth alternative to disappear due to lack of developer support.
- Coinbase: zkSNARKS and Cryptographic Accumulators
- Flux is Live on Mainnet. Flux is a prediction market built on NEAR.
- Flux — decentralizing mainnet
Blog Posts
- Ethereum is a Dark Forest
- zkSNARKS and Cryptographic Accumulators
- Write your Own Virtual Machine
- Write your Own Proof-of-Work Blockchain
- What is a Cryptographic Hash Function?
- A Gentle Introduction to Zero Knowledge Proofs with Hands on Examples. Examples in Rust.
Papers
- PLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge. The new zkSNARK construction that will be employed in future revisions of Zcash.
- Consensus Redux: Distributed Ledgers in the Face of Adversarial Supremacy
- Polynomial IOPs for Linear Algebra Relations
- RANDCHAIN: Decentralised Randomness Beacon from Sequential Proof-of-Work
Projects
- Crust. Official Rust implementation of the Crust protocol.
- Fluence. Peer-to-peer computing protocol and licensing system.
- Fluence Compute Engine. FCE is intended to run various Wasm binaries. At now, it is in the heavily developing phase. Docs and tutorials are also in the work-in-progress state.
- Zcash Halo2
- Moonbeam. Moonbeam provides an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications.
- Nomic. Rust implementation of the Nomic Bitcoin sidechain.
- Openlimits. A Rust high performance cryptocurrency trading API with support for multiple exchanges and language wrappers.
- PLONK. Pure Rust implementation of the PLONK ZKProof System done by the Dusk-Network team.
- Rio Chain. Rio DeFi is the blockchain technology company that developed Rio Chain, featuring robust security, speed, scalability, and interoperability with existing blockchains.
- Rusk. Dusk’s Smart Contract Platform.
- Rusk VM. The Dusk Rust WASM VM implementation.
- SnarkOS is a decentralized operating system for private applications. It forms the backbone of Aleo and enables applications to verify and store state in a publicly verifiable manner.
- ZEXE. Zero knowledge EXEcution is a Rust library for decentralized private computation.
Podcasts and Videos
- Introduction to zkSync
- WebAssembly Migration with Nicolo Davis and its script
- ZKPodcast: Aleo with Howard Wu
Most Active in August
Parity: 204 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 95 closed issues (1, 2), 85 open issues (1, 2, 3)
Solana: 271 merged PRs (1), 20 closed issues (1), 52 open issues (1)
Libra: 213 merged PRs (1), 38 closed issues (1), 45 open issues (1)
Zcash: 120 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 88 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 45 open issues (1, 2, 3)
Project Updates
COMIT
140 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 14 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 0 open issues
- PR: Standardized COMIT Expiry Times by @tcharding
- PR: Save orders to the DB and allow them to be fetched again by @thomaseizinger
- PR: Handle deploy for ERC20 by @tcharding
- PR: Several refactoring patches as a preparation for the re-design of the orderbook in the context of tantalus + some cool features by @thomaseizinger
- PR: Geth v1.9.18 instead of parity, upgrade to rust web3 0.13 by @da-kami
Crypto.com Chain
100 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 59 closed issues (1, 2), 20 open issues (1, 2)
- News: Crypto.com Chain Dev Update #11
- Technical whitepaper and General whitepaper have been updated
- Our technical documentation site is revamped along with our new GitHub Activities page
- News: Microsoft Azure “one-click” Deployment is available to provide easy deployment option
- News: Node.js Library Available on NPM
- PR: Problem: no tx-validation enclave attested TLS listener for receiving secrets from TDBE (fixes #1994) by @tomtau
- PR: Problem: Missing runner for TDBE + No persistence of TDBE fetched transactions by @devashishdxt
Holochain
1 merged PRs (1), 0 closed issues, 0 open issues
- News:
- Videos:
- Hosted hApps - First Demo of a dApp Hosted on Holo
- HoloPort Nano Demo
- Holochain Ecosystem Sessions: hummHive, Junto
- PR: fix for failed publish of authored entries by @zippy
Libra
213 merged PRs (1), 38 closed issues (1), 45 open issues (1)
- News: Testnet push announcement for 08/26, 08/20, 08/06
- PR: [move-prover] Enhanced governance-related specs by @junkil-park
- PR: [network][handshake protocol] refactoring and implementing test/fuzzing by @mimoo
- PR: [network] Random hardening by @davidiw
- PR: [breaking][bugfix][vm] Charge gas for emit_event by @tzakian
- PR: [network] [breaking] enable onchain and encryption and vector of addresses by @davidiw
Lighthouse
1 merged PRs (1), 40 closed issues (1), 28 open issues (1)
- News: Lighthouse Update #28
- Blog: Setup Ethereum 2.0 Validator Node with Lighthouse on Meddala, Goerli
- PR: [Merged by Bors] - Update score decay behaviour by @AgeManning
MobileCoin
75 merged PRs (1), 0 closed issues, 0 open issues
- PR: MCC-959 side-channel resistant merkle proof validation by @garbageslam
- PR: Make slog actually work inside of sgx enclave/impl crates by @garbageslam
- PR: TxManager traits, mocks, and tests by @mfaulk
NEAR
81 merged PRs (1), 60 closed issues (1), 71 open issues (1)
- News:
- News: Community Update
- Blog: The Rainbow Bridge: FAQs and Answers By 4NTS
- Blog: A primer on Flux liquidity incentives
- Video: Whitepaper Circle: Nightshade NEAR Protocol Sharding Design
- PR: feat: implement gas profiler. by @olonho
- PR: fix (runtime): Finishing adding wasmtime support by @willemneal
Nervos
44 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 9 closed issues (1, 2), 3 open issues (1)
- News:
- Nervos CKB Development Update #39
- Trail of Bits selected to audit Nervos’ smart contract security
- Nervos researcher Dr. Ren Zhang invited to join NDSS Special Committee of Blockchain Reviewers
- Want to deposit CKB into Nervos DAO via Ledger? Here’s how
- Crypto exchange HitBTC lists Nervos CKB for trading
- The Nervos community releases new development tools for BSN integration
- Nervos Integrates Band Protocol to Bring Scalable Oracle Technology & Extensive Real-World Data To DApps
- Integrating Chainlink’s Widely Used Oracles into Nervos to Secure Off-Chain Connectivity
- Portal Wallet: Enabling CKB to connect with wallets around the world
- Nervos Quarterly Letter: Updates & Highlights from Q2
- Nervos approves Obsidian Labs grant for Windows and browser-based IDE
- How Tocial plans to help cosplayers monetize with Nervos’ help
- Grin Community Collaboration to Bring Mimblewimble to Nervos
- Nervos Community Update: July 2020
- News: CKB Weekly 16, 15, 14
- Blog: Nervos Episode IV — A New Hope (for DeFi)
- Videos:
- Dapps with CKB Workshop | Lecture 4, 3-2, 3-1, 2, 1-2, 1-1
- PW-Core Programming Walkthrough
- How to Develop a CKB DApp with Keypering (Chinese + English Subtitles)
- CKB Studio Tutorial
- Understanding the Token Sale Lock Script
- PR: Feat: lazy initialization memory by @mohanson
- PR: Introduce version and fix various bugs by @xxuejie
Oasis
3 merged PRs (1, 2), 0 closed issues, 0 open issues
- News:
- Blog:
- Programming Data and Money: The Data Market Yield. How the Oasis Network can enable not just programmable money — like other blockchains — but tokenized data that can help users be fairly compensated for their data and personal information.
- The Journey of a Transaction. A story illustrating how transactions are processed by the Oasis Network, and how it’s first-of-its-kind design allows data to remain confidential, private, and highly available on the network.
- The Internet’s Untapped Potential The Oasis Foundation’s proposal for a new ethos for digital stewardship, and how with the right technology and the right guiding principles, we can create a society that handles data and individuals rights more responsibly.
- PR: Add custom section with version info to WASM by @mitjat
- PR: Update to oasis-core 20.9 by @ptrus
Parity
204 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 95 closed issues (1, 2), 85 open issues (1, 2, 3)
- News:
- Videos:
- PR: Implement request-responses protocols by @tomaka
- PR: Add a DirectedGossip struct by @tomaka
- PR: RpcHandlers Refactorings by @seunlanlege
- PR: Dynamic Benchmarking DB Whitelist by @shawntabrizi
Secret Network
63 merged PRs (1, 2), 42 closed issues (1, 2), 12 open issues (1, 2)
- News:
- Blog: Secret Staking Derivatives: Liquidity Meets Privacy
- Blog: Secret Tokens: Programmable Privacy for DeFi
- PR: New and improved input validation by @Cashmaney
- PR: CosmWasm v0.10 by @reuvenpo
- PR: Make query gas limit configurable for nodes by @assafmo
Solana
271 merged PRs (1), 20 closed issues (1), 52 open issues (1)
- News: Coinbase Custody Now Supports Solana
- Video: The Future of DeFi
- Podcast: Justin Drake - Ethereum 2.0 Researcher Ep #25
- Podcast: Sam Bankman-Fried - CEO of FTX, Co-founder of Serum Ep #24
- PR: Submit a vote timestamp every vote by @mvines
- PR: Switch programs activation to whole-set based gating by @jackcmay
Zcash
120 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 88 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 45 open issues (1, 2, 3)
- News:
- Report: Zcash Network Privacy: An Assessment of Current State and Future Work.
- PR: ZIP212 implementation by @therealyingtong
- PR: zebra-state: Add support for temporary sled databases by @vramana
- PR: Fix sync algorithm. by @hdevalence
- PR: bellman: add VerificationError by @hdevalence
Events
Sep 7-27 | Online
Sep 15-16 | Online
Sep 15-30 | Online
NEAR Hackathon: Hack The Rainbow
Sep 17-18 | Surrey, UK
4th International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology - CBT 2020
Oct 1-30 | Online
ETHOnline 2020. Summits + Hackathon.
Oct 16–30 | Online
Oct 21-23 | NYC, US
ACM Advances in Financial Technologies
Oct 27-28 | Dubai
Careers
Casper Labs | Remote
Findora | Beijing, China; Menlo Park, CA, US
Moonbeam | Boston, MA USA; Madrid, Spain; Remote
More jobs can be found at Job Board.
Want to be included in the next issue? Feel free to submit a PR to the #16 draft, or Tweet @rust_blockchain.
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