RiB Newsletter #18 – On to the Ribbles

December 03, 2020

Welcome to the #18 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #17.

It’s a good time right now to be patient and cautious with the health of our blockchains. Oh, and also our frail human bodies.

Anyway, on to the ribbles! (That’s Rust-in-Blockchain Nibbles, I guess)

This month, Oasis, a blockchain that runs Rust contracts on WASM inside secure enclaves, launched their mainnet. The Ethereum 2 beacon chain also went live. NEAR has a whiteboard video with the Sigma Prime team, who develops Lighthouse, the Eth2 client in Rust. It introduces the network layer in Eth2, how the nodes communicate, and more. Congrats to both the Oasis and Lighthouse teams!

From projects we typically cover, Parity and NEAR released many good videos this month, which are great resources for developers to learn programming blockchain.

Brian, one of the RiB editors, has continued documenting his experiments with Rust-based smart contract platforms, this month publishing his initial impressions of Substrate and Ink. We hope to bring more of this kind of content to the RiB community in the future.

We open-sourced ribbot, the script that helps us generate progress reports from GitHub repos. It currently has no documentation or readability. If you ever wonder why the stats we publish for your project seem wrong, the answer is somewhere in here. We plan to slowly refactor it and hope it can be a general purpose tool program that is useful for other projects.

RiB has recently received requests from multiple organizations to advertise in the newsletter or the website. As RiB is always a community project, we do not want to make any decisions without open discussion first. We ask your thoughts about how to handle advertising or sponsored content in RiB. Please reply to this newsletter email directly, or discuss on the Telegram group.

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: apruden2008, Paulii, Stanley Jones, Tony Arcieri, 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 #19 draft.

Project Spotlight

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

arkworks.

Arkworks is “an ecosystem for developing and programming with zkSNARKs”. It particularly stands out for abstracting over multiple SNARK constructions, including Groth16, GM17, and Marlin.

The team recently gave a talk at zkSummit6: zkSummit6: arkworks: A Rust Ecosystem for zkSNARKs – Pratyush Mishra.

The best entry point for understanding the code as of now appears to be the snark repository, which defines generic traits for zkSNARKS.

This work is an extension of that done for the previously-published Zexe: Enabling Decentralized Private Computation.

Interesting Things

News

Oasis launched its mainnet on Nov 18th. Oasis Mainnet: Ushering in a New Era of Privacy and Scalability and its documentation: Mainnet Overview.

Blog Posts

Introducing the k256 crate: a pure Rust secp256k1 library based on projective formulas
Build your own: GPG. Implementing one part of the PGP standard in Rust.
Using Bloom filters to efficiently synchronise hash graphs
Your Computer Isn’t Yours. An interesting read about personal security. Not Rust or blockchain.

Papers

Projects

Firma. Firma is a tool to create bitcoin multisig wallets with private keys stored on offline devices.
fe. Emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum blockchain. The language was initially created as the Rust implementation of the Vyper compiler.
t3rn. A protocol for interoperable code execution between multiple blockchains, which makes it safe and simple.
Kulupu. Kulupu is a pure (no pre-mine, no gadget) proof-of-work blockchain built on the Substrate framework, supporting on-chain governance and online upgrades. It uses the ASIC-resistant RandomX mining algorithm.