RiB Newsletter #15 – Turbofish in the Blocksea

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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…

Fluence.

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

Blog Posts

Papers

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

 

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

Crypto.com Chain

100 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 59 closed issues (1, 2), 20 open issues (1, 2)

Holochain

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

Libra

213 merged PRs (1), 38 closed issues (1), 45 open issues (1)

Lighthouse

1 merged PRs (1), 40 closed issues (1), 28 open issues (1)

MobileCoin

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

NEAR

81 merged PRs (1), 60 closed issues (1), 71 open issues (1)

Nervos

44 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 9 closed issues (1, 2), 3 open issues (1)

Oasis

3 merged PRs (1, 2), 0 closed issues, 0 open issues

Parity

204 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 95 closed issues (1, 2), 85 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Secret Network

63 merged PRs (1, 2), 42 closed issues (1, 2), 12 open issues (1, 2)

Solana

271 merged PRs (1), 20 closed issues (1), 52 open issues (1)

Zcash

120 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 88 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 45 open issues (1, 2, 3)

 

Events

Sep 7-27 | Online

Chainlink Hackathon

Sep 15-16 | Online

Crypto Privacy Conference

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

Cosmos Hackathon: HackAtom V

Oct 21-23 | NYC, US

ACM Advances in Financial Technologies

Oct 27-28 | Dubai

Future Blockchain Summit

 

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.

Join the discussion on RiB telegram group ❤️