RiB Newsletter #34

April 06, 2022

Welcome to the #34 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the monthly newsletter about Rust, distributed systems, cryptography, and other industry topics. Previous: #33.

After a fairly sleepy winter, this month felt overwhelmingly active, with lots of conversation in the Telegram group, lots of contributions to the newsletter, and many new projects coming to our attention.

This month we refreshed and reorganized the set of GitHub repositories we track, and which are listed in the Project Updates section. The corresponding rib-bible is likely the most comprehensive list of Rust blockchains and their source repositories on the internet.

Thanks to a big contribution by Hunter Trujillo the project updates now have entire sections for most Bitcoin and Lightning Network-related Rust projects and many Ethereum-related Rust projects. There’s been a ton of activity lately, so it’s been hard to keep track! Many of them are overseen by the LNP/BP Association and Spiral, which are dedicated to building layer 2/3 technologies on top of Bitcoin and Lightning. Their GitHub README is a good overview of their many Rust Bitcoin projects; and there are many other Rust Bitcoin projects now listed in the project updates section.

Diem has not seen any contributions in the last month, and appears unlikely to continue in its current form. Several projects though are carrying the technology forward, particularly its seemingly well-designed and Rust-inspired Move language.

These two projects were launched by former Diem team members recently:

Aptos - It appears to fork the Diem codebase directly.
Sui - It does not obviously fork from the Diem codebase.

These blockchains are or will be using Move:

0L - A fork of Diem / Libra.
Celo - An EVM chain based on Geth, adding Move support.
Pontem - Built on Substrate.
Starcoin - Not a fork of Diem.

We have also added some more projects: Espresso, an EVM-compatible chain with ZK-rollups written in Rust; Helium, the distributed wireless hotspot network, which has many components in Rust; and MaidSafe, probably the oldest permissionless distributed system written in Rust, still in development.

With the great expansion of projects covered, we’ve also expanded the Most Active rankings from 3 to 5 projects. This month’s data shows that IOTA, Fuel, and Espresso are among the most actively developed Rust blockchain projects.

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: Ali Atiia, Dan Shields, djddo, Ganzaro, Giles Cope, Hunter Trujillo, John Adler, Max Wegman, Samuel Dare, Tannr, veilgets, 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 next draft.

Project Spotlight

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

jellyfish.

Jellyfish is the PLONK zero-knowledge proof implementation used by the Espresso blockchain. As described in their blog, what stands out about this library is its built-in toolbox of circuits for cryptographic purposes: hashes, pseudo-random functions, Merkle tree accumulators, Schnorr signatures, ElGamal encryption, AEAD encryption. It is also said to be performant.

Interesting Things

Blog Posts

A Comparison of Heterogeneous Blockchain Networks
The AMM Test: A No BS Look at L1 Performance
Geometry presents: Slush, a proposal for Fractal scaling
Towards Practical Security Optimizations for Binaries
High Assurance Rust. A book about developing secure and robust systems software.
Taproot Asset Representation Overlay

Papers

Projects

groth16-sol-verifier. An implementation of the Groth16 zk-SNARK proving system on Solana.
White Whale. A novel decentralized arbitrage platform built on the Terra blockchain.
Multicall. On-chain query aggregator/batcher in Terra.
symbolic-stack-machines. Library for building symbolically executable stack-based virtual machines.
eclipse. Bridging ecosystems by storing Zero-knowledge proofs of Solana votes on the Aleo blockchain.
sui. A smart contract platform with high throughput, low latency, and an asset-oriented programming model powered by the Move programming language.
reusable-taproot-addresses

Security Advisories

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

Most Active in March

Parity: 534 merged PRs, 164 closed issues, 98 open issues

Solana: 449 merged PRs, 112 closed issues, 79 open issues

IOTA: 261 merged PRs, 102 closed issues, 42 open issues

Fuel: 240 merged PRs, 135 closed issues, 104 open issues

Espresso Systems: 212 merged PRs, 150 closed issues, 89 open issues

Project Updates

Aleo

103 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 48 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 19 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Anoma

28 merged PRs (1, 2), 26 closed issues (1), 20 open issues (1, 2)

An Overview of Anoma’s Architecture

ChainSafe

49 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 29 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 37 open issues (1, 2, 3)

COMIT

10 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 5 closed issues (1, 2), 7 open issues (1, 2)

Concordium

16 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 1 closed issues (1), 18 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Conflux

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

DarkFi

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

Dfinity

96 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 9 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 8 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Introducing Supernova, the First Global Internet Computer Hackathon

Safe Network update 17 March, 2022

MobileCoin

103 merged PRs (1, 2), 19 closed issues (1), 50 open issues (1)

NEAR

167 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), 119 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), 68 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

NEAR’s Road to Decentralization: Building Bridges

Nervos

174 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), 10 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 4 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Oasis

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

Oasis Network Damask Upgrade secured a big majority vote from validators

Parity

534 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15), 164 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), 98 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)