RiB Newsletter #20 - Old fashioned chill

February 03, 2021

Welcome to the #20 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the chillest newsletter about the chillest tech. Previous: #19.

Within the blockchain industry and without, the rate of Rust job postings appears to be on a steady rise, and every month we come across interesting new Rust gigs. New public job postings are listed in the “Careers” section in this newsletter, while previously-open listings are on the website job board. It’s a good time to be a skilled Rust programmer, especially for those of us into blockchain tech.

For those wanting to stay the most up to date with what’s going on, the pace of the RiB Telegram group has been picking up lately, and the announcements and discussions there are more detailed than the brief one-liners in the newsletter.

Representatives from Rust blockchain projects will often hop in and link to developer tools, events, and jobs. While we usually include these links in the newsletter, we also generally strip out the details and nuance of the message.

This month we talked a lot about Rust smart contract platforms, including the possibility of creating a single Rust library that abstracts over multiple blockchain runtimes.

Still, it is a low-volume group that only permits developer-relevant content — typical blockchain marketing spam is moderated away.

On that note, we welcome Ilya as our new administrator. Ilya’s vigilance is one of the reasons there’s so little spam in the group.

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: Adam Gutierrez, apruden2008, Ernest Kissiedu, Leonardo Yvens, Paul, 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 #21 draft.

Project Spotlight

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

mev-inspect

This is a tool for analyzing historical miner extractable value (MEV) on Ethereum. “Miner extractable value” refers to value that can be earned by miners directly from transactions, through e.g. mempool frontrunning, as opposed to traditional miner rewards. It was defined and analyzed in the Flashboys 2.0 paper, which claims that the phenomenon poses near-term system risk to Ethereum’s security by skewing the economic incentives of miners in unanticipated ways. mev-inspect then is a tool designed to illuminate how bots today are competing with each other to squeeze value out of Ethereum transactions.

It can introspect transactions with common DeFi applications, including Uniswap, Aave, and Curve, to find instances of arbitrage, liquidations, and other front-runnable activites.

It is described further in a post on the Ethereum research forum.

mev-inspect communicates with Ethereum nodes via the ethers crate.

Interesting Things

News

Dfinity: Announcing the Internet Computer “Mainnet” and a 20-Year Roadmap

Blog Posts

Solana Development Tutorial: Things you should know before structuring your code
Programming on Solana - An Introduction
Candid: A Common Language for Application Interfaces on the Internet Computer. Source code: Candid.
First impressions of programming on DFINITY
An approximate introduction to how zk-SNARKs are possible. A typically good post from Vitalik that helps illuminate a difficult subject

Papers

Projects

Anchor, a Rust eDSL for writing Solana programs
Concordium
- This is an enterprise blockchain that runs Rust smart contracts on wasm
- Concordium releases Testnet 4
- They are looking for people to test their smart contracts and network ahead of the mainnet launch in Q2
DIDKit provides Verifiable Credential and Decentralized Identifier functionality across different platforms
Mirror Core Contracts. A DeFi smart contract that implements Mirror Protocol on the Terra blockchain, written in Rust