RiB Newsletter #24 - Bridges

Welcome to the #24 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the chillest newsletter about the chillest tech. Previous: #23

This month we’re interested in cross-chain bridges. With Ethereum at capacity recently, other blockchain projects are eyeing the window of opportunity between now and a functional Ethereum 2 to siphon away some of that chain’s activity. So there seems to be a rush to get bridges built between Ethereum and every other chain, not to mention between pairs of non-Ethereum chains. It looks like we are well on our way to an internetwork of blockchains, so now is a good time to do a survey of bridges to Rust chains.

These bridges mostly support moving fungible tokens today, and some plan to support NFTs; contrasting with general cross-chain communications protocols like IBC and XCMP.

While the details differ between bridges and chains, it seems that many of these bridges are their own distributed networks, with similar behavior:

  • They operate a network of validators.
  • They maintain custodial contracts on each chain.
  • Multisig cryptography is used by the validators to agree on pairs of cross-chain transactions.
  • The bridge network may offer cryptoeconomic incentives for node operators.
  • Watchdog nodes may monitor the network for misbehavior.
  • Some of these networks are themselves blockchains, but many are not.

For a more informed description of bridges see this recent blog post from Patrick McCorry.

Some of those in the Rust world include

Polkadot’s family of bridges is described here.

 

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: A Pruden, Júlio Santos, Max Wegman, naternater, Tor Bair, 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 #25 draft.

 

Project Spotlight

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

TDN (and Chamomile).

Trusted Distributed Network is a framework for building distributed applications, with support for p2p communications, multiple cross-communicating blockchains, multiple layers of blockchains, and multiple account models. It is built on a new p2p library, Chamomile.

TDN appears to be somewhat comparable to Substrate, and Chamomile to libp2p.

Chamomile adds to the choices available to Rust developers for p2p networking, which already include rust-libp2p, and tentacle.

These projects are authored by @sunhauchuang who also created Awesome Rust Blockchain.

 

Interesting Things

News

Blog Posts

Papers

Projects

  • snarkVM. A Virtual Machine for Zero-Knowledge Executions.
  • Polkadex. An Orderbook-based Decentralized Exchange using the Substrate Blockchain Framework.

 

Most Active in May

Solana: 421 merged PRs (1, 2), 46 closed issues (1, 2), 67 open issues (1, 2)

Parity: 275 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 96 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 78 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Aleo: 100 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 41 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 42 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

 

Project Updates

Aleo

100 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 41 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 42 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

COMIT

53 merged PRs (1), 23 closed issues (1), 14 open issues (1)

Concordium

36 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 1 closed issues (1), 12 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Conflux

12 merged PRs (1), 5 closed issues (1), 3 open issues (1)

Diem

104 merged PRs (1, 2), 21 closed issues (1), 10 open issues (1)

Elrond

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

Fluence

31 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 2 closed issues (1, 2), 7 open issues (1, 2)

Golem

33 merged PRs (1), 39 closed issues (1), 26 open issues (1)

Grin

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

Holochain

37 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 0 closed issues, 6 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Interledger

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

IOTA

41 merged PRs (1), 17 closed issues (1), 1 open issues (1)

Lighthouse

21 merged PRs (1, 2), 8 closed issues (1, 2), 9 open issues (1)

MobileCoin

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

NEAR

59 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 29 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 29 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Nervos

60 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 8 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 4 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Parity

275 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 96 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 78 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Rust Bitcoin

39 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 11 closed issues (1), 3 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Rust Ethereum

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

Secret Network

10 merged PRs (1), 2 closed issues (1), 6 open issues (1, 2)

Solana

421 merged PRs (1, 2), 46 closed issues (1, 2), 67 open issues (1, 2)

Spacemesh

3 merged PRs (1, 2), 40 closed issues (1), 14 open issues (1)

TezEdge

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

Zcash

82 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 17 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 61 open issues (1, 2, 3)

zkSync

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

 

Events

Sep 26-28 | Arlington, VA, US

ACM Advances in Financial Technologies - AFT 2021

Oct 4-8 | Darmstadt, Germany

5th International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology - CBT 2021

Oct 6–8 | Darmstadt, Germany

STM2021: The 17th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management

 

Careers

Aleo | San Francisco, Remote

Fractal Protocol | Remote or Berlin

Kollider | Remote

Parity Technologies | Berlin or 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 #25 draft.

Join the discussion on RiB telegram group ❤️