RiB Newsletter #32

Welcome to the #32 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the monthly newsletter about Rust, distributed systems, cryptography, and other industry topics. Previous: #31.

 

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: bbyleggo123, Daniel Lubarov, Dan Shields, John Adler, Philip Glazman, PopcornPaws, Squirrel, TannrA, Brian Anderson, 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 next draft.

 

Project Spotlight

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

Trampoline.

Trampoline is a Rust-based smart contract framework for the UTXO-based Nervos network. Whereas most smart contract platforms are account-based, with a programming model that is relatively easy to reason about in the imperative style, there are comparatively few smart contracts of any complexity written for UTXO blockchains. This project is an attempt to make writing UTXO-based contracts more accessible.

 

Interesting Things

News

• The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?
• Statement by Diem CEO Stuart Levey on the Sale of the Diem Group’s Assets to Silvergate

Blog Posts

• Electric Capital Developer Report (2021)
• Part 1: The life of an optimization barrier
• Part 2: Improving crypto code in Rust using LLVM’s optnone

Papers

• An Introduction to Secret-Sharing-Based Secure Multiparty Computation
• Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Multiple Verifiers
• PlonKup: Reconciling PlonK with plookup
• Titanium: A Metadata-Hiding File-Sharing System with Malicious Security
• LedgerHedger: Gas Reservation for Smart-Contract Security
• Broken Proofs of Solvency in Blockchain Custodial Wallets and Exchanges
• XCC: Theft-Resilient and Collateral-Optimized Cryptocurrency-Backed Assets
• Preparation for Post-Quantum era: a survey about blockchain schemes from a post-quantum perspective

Projects

• Plonky2 is a SNARK implementation based on techniques from PLONK and FRI. The announcement: Introducing Plonky2.
• Schnorrkel implements Schnorr signature on Ristretto compressed Ed25519 points, as well as related protocols like HDKD, MuSig, and a verifiable random function (VRF).
• ref-fvm. Reference implementation of the Filecoin Virtual Machine [v0, pre-alpha].
• Scrt-RNG. Secret Oracle - RNG will be a decentralized source of private randomness on Secret Network.
• stable-swap. The source for the Saber stableswap AMM on Solana.

 

Security Advisories

Monthly security advisories, from RustSec, and GitHub Advisories. Bold entries here are especially relevant to blockchain projects.

• RUSTSEC-2021-0133: cargo-download is unmaintained.
• RUSTSEC-2021-0134: rental is unmaintained.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0004: Vulnerability in rustc-serialize.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0001: lmdb is unmaintained.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0002: Vulnerability in dashmap.
• CVE-2022-21658: Vulnerability in std. Time-of-check time-of-use race condition can allow attacker to delete files they do not have access to delete.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0003: Vulnerability in ammonia.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0005: ftd2xx-embedded-hal is unmaintained.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0006: Vulnerability in thread_local.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0007: Unsoundness in qcell.
• CVE-2022-21685: Integer underflow in Frontier. Frontier is an ethereum compatibility for substrate
• CVE-2021-39480: Denial of service in bingrep.
• CVE-2021-46102: Integer overflow in solana_rbpf.

 

Most Active in January

Solana: 332 merged PRs (1, 2), 51 closed issues (1, 2), 55 open issues (1, 2)

Parity: 304 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 108 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 90 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

NEAR: 184 merged PRs (1, 2), 54 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 57 open issues (1, 2, 3)

 

Project Updates

Aleo

129 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 28 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 36 open issues (1, 2, 3)

• Intro to Leo Programming Language

Anoma

42 merged PRs (1, 2), 33 closed issues (1), 38 open issues (1)

• An Introduction to zk-SNARK: Plonkup

ChainSafe

53 merged PRs (1, 2), 45 closed issues (1, 2), 18 open issues (1, 2)

COMIT

5 merged PRs (1), 5 closed issues (1), 4 open issues (1)

• ItchySats - Unpacking the CFD protocol

Concordium

13 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 3 closed issues (1, 2), 9 open issues (1, 2, 3)

• Alpha Centauri 3.0 — Mainnet- Release notes

Conflux

98 merged PRs (1), 6 closed issues (1), 7 open issues (1)

DarkFi

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

Dfinity

28 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 8 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 4 open issues (1, 2, 3)

• ‘The Internet Computer for Geeks’: A New DFINITY White Paper

Elrond

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

Findora

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

Fluence

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

Fuel

165 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), 78 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 108 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Golem

12 merged PRs (1, 2), 13 closed issues (1), 12 open issues (1, 2)

Grin

8 merged PRs (1), 8 closed issues (1), 0 open issues

Holochain

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

IOTA

8 merged PRs (1), 1 closed issues (1), 5 open issues (1)

Lighthouse

1 merged PRs (1), 34 closed issues (1), 18 open issues (1)

• New releases v2.1.2

MobileCoin

76 merged PRs (1), 2 closed issues (1), 46 open issues (1)

NEAR

184 merged PRs (1, 2), 54 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 57 open issues (1, 2, 3)

• NEAR Launches Stake Farming To Unlock Ecosystem Rewards
• An Update On the NEAR Validator Upgrade
• NEAR Enhances Decentralization with Validator Upgrade

Nervos

35 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 2 closed issues (1, 2), 2 open issues (1, 2)

• A Beginner’s Guide To Nervos

Parity

304 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 108 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 90 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

• Polkadot v1.0: Sharding and Economic Security

Rust Bitcoin

72 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 37 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 27 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Rust Ethereum

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

Secret Network

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

• Secret Feature: Secret Oracles
• Secret Griptape Hackathon

Solana

332 merged PRs (1, 2), 51 closed issues (1, 2), 55 open issues (1, 2)

• solana-pay. A new standard for decentralized payments.
• Open issue: Consider adding user specified fees to prioritize txs propagation to the leader/block #22820
• Solana Internals Part 2: How Is a Solana Program Deployed and Upgraded
• Solana Internals Part 3: The Transaction Processing Unit (TPU)
• Solana Internals Part 4: The Bank — A Key Component
• A technical overview of developing gold.xyz on Solana
• Events: Introducing the Solana Hacker House Inaugural World Tour

Spacemesh

2 merged PRs (1), 58 closed issues (1, 2), 14 open issues (1)

Subspace Labs

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

• Archiving Kusama on the Subspace Aries Test Network

TezEdge

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

Zcash

77 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 61 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 63 open issues (1, 2, 3)

• New Release 4.6.0-1

zkSync

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

• On Managing Secure Upgradability

 

Events

Feb 5-6 | Online

FOSDEM 2022

Feb 11-20 | Denver

ETHDenver 2022

Apr 16 - May 13th | Online

Scaling Ethereum

Apr 18-25 | Amsterdam

Devconnect

May 2-6 | Canada

Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022

Jun 13-17 | Šibenik, Croatia

Summer school on real-world crypto and privacy

Aug 29-31 | Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University

SBC'22: The Science of Blockchain Conference 2022

 

Careers

Aurora | Remote

• Blockchain/EVM Engineer

Fluence | Remote

• Rust Engineer (AquaVM)

NEAR | Remote

• Core Engineer

Pine Street Labs | San Francisco or Remote

• Custody Engineer

Polygon Zero | Remote

• Senior Protocol Engineer

More jobs can be found at Job Board.

 

Want to be included in the next issue? Feel free to submit a PR to the next draft.

Join the discussion on RiB telegram group ❤️