RiB Newsletter #17 – Trick? Or Trait?

November 04, 2020

Welcome to the #17 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #16.

Welcome to November, Rust blockchaineers. We hope you’ve been writing some great Rust.

Though mostly not Rust-specific, the coolest stuff we’ve got for you this month are a bunch of interesting new papers on blockchain-related topics. Check those out in the “Papers” section.

Almost every month we see one or two mainnet launches, and this one continues that trend as Conflux launched their mainnet. Congratulations to the Conflux team! Conflux is an EVM-compatible proof-of-work chain with high transaction throughput, written in Rust.

Hiring for Rust blockchain developers seems to be increasing, particularly within the Chinese Rust communities, where we see some new blockchain startups using Rust, including Patract Labs, who are developing on Substrate, and TaiDi Tech. A Rust conference is being planned for December in Shanghai, and there are likely to be talks from major Rust blockchain companies.

Some changes in RiB:

We updated the contributing policies a bit, and the RiB Newsletter now only accepts contributions through GitHub pull requests, not email or other means. This will both reduce our workload, and create a proper record of who contributed what. Thanks for your cooperation.

We are being more selective about what goes into the “Project Updates” sections, as the volume of content there had gotten overwhelming in previous months. Hopefully these sections will be more focused and meaningful in the future.

On the website, we added learning resources for new blockchain programmers. Please contribute content as well as suggestions to this page, and let’s improve the learning experience together.

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: apruden2008, ashput, Damascene, Daniel Karzel, David Ansermino, Mikko Ohtamaa, Paulii, 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 by submitting a PR to the #18 draft.

Project Spotlight

Each month we like to shine a light on a notable Rust blockchain project. This month that project is…

lnp-node.

lnp-node is an implementation of the Lightning Network in Rust, created by the LNP/BP Standards Association.

It’s not obvious how this implementation relates to the reference implementation, but between the LNP-BP GitHub org and the rust-bitcoin GitHub org, which LNP-BP depends on, there is quite a lot of development going into Bitcoin implementations in Rust.

It’s active and well documented, so for Rust hackers looking to get involved in Bitcoin layer 2 development, this seems like a promising entry point.

lnp-node has a modular architecture that depends on a number of other Rust crates that look like they could be reused with relative ease:

rust-lnpbp - the lightning network protocol
rust-bitcoin - the bitcoin protocol (but not a full node)
rust-secp256k1 - bindings to the official implementation of bitcoin’s elliptic curve
rust-miniscript - implementation of a subset of Bitcoin Script
rust-amplify - some rust-language helpers, including generic trait implementations, type wrappers and custom derives

Interesting Things

News

Conflux: Tethys Mainnet is Live

Blog Posts

A pitfall of Rust’s move/copy/drop semantics and zeroing data
Rusty Chains: A Basic Blockchain Implementation Written in Pure Rust
Towards formal semantics of the beacon chain’s pyspec
Rust no-std FAQ. Basic and useful.
Rust after the honeymoon. It isn’t blockchain related. The write features some that also very useful for blockchain developers.
An Interview with Torben P. Pedersen about the Pedersen Commitment.
Playing with Randomness and Interactions to Prove Theorems
Privacy is normal, safe and essential
SNARKs and the future of blockchains
People of Parity: Bastian Köcher. Besides technology, Parity also creates lovely developer stories.

Papers

Projects

Curve on Zinc. The Curve Stableswap smart contract implementation in Zinc v0.2.0.
Marlin contains various zk-SNARK protocol implementations for recursive SNARK composition.
Oak. Meaningful control of data in distributed systems.
Serum-dex.
BTC-Parachain. BTC-Parachain: Trustless Bitcoin on Polkadot (Mirror).
arcturus. Pure rust implementation of Arcturus proofs for confidential transactions.
- Its paper Arcturus: efficient proofs for confidential transactions