RiB Newsletter #38

Welcome to the #38 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the monthly newsletter about Rust, distributed systems, cryptography, and other industry topics. Previous: #37.

Things are feeling kind of slow lately: not a lot of technical blog posts coming out of Rust blockchains, development velocity of some projects has slowed, no new job postings this month.

Both Aptos and Sui, successor projects to Diem, have somewhat surprisingly jumped to the top of the most active lists this month. Thanks to John Adler, our ribbot tool that we use to measure GitHub activity now filters out activity from dependabot, and also finally has some CI set up.

Stellar will soon be a Rust blockchain, with their new smart contract platform, Soroban, written in Rust and running Rust programs.

 

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: Alexey Shekhirin, Hunter Trujillo, John Adler, Mike, Samuel Dare, 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…

danta.

Danta is an event registration web app that handles payments over the Lightning Network. It uses tonic_lnd for LND RPC, and will debut for the first Lightning Hackday in Buenos Aires, which will be announced soon.

 

Interesting Things

Blog Posts

• Zero Knowledge Proof — Error Explanation when developing Custom Gate
• A Twitter thread about Luca Stealer. An open source malware written in Rust that, among other things, steals from crypto wallet browser extensions.

Papers

• Bitcoin-Enhanced Proof-of-Stake Security: Possibilities and Impossibilities
• Almost-Surely Terminating Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement Against General Adversaries with Optimal Resilience
• Lattice-Based SNARKs: Publicly Verifiable, Preprocessing, and Recursively Composable
• Practical UC-Secure Zero-Knowledge Smart Contracts
• Foundations of Coin Mixing Services
• On the Computational Hardness of the Code Equivalence Problem in Cryptography
• Arithmetization of Σ¹₁ relations in Halo 2
• Privacy when Everyone is Watching: An SOK on Anonymity on the Blockchain
• Scalable and Transparent Proofs over All Large Fields, via Elliptic Curves - STARK proofs for Bitcoin ECDSA signatures over the secp256k1 field

Projects

• rs-soroban-env. A new smart contract environment for Stellar. Written in Rust, and running Rust. The announcement: Project Jump Cannon: Soroban Preview Release.
• narwhal-abci-evm. An experiment that combines Sui’s Narwhal fast consensus with Cosmos’s ABCI with REVM.

 

Security Advisories

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

• RUSTSEC-2022-0037: async-graphql - denial of service on deeply nested fragment requests.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0034: pkcs11 - unsoundness in pkcs11.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0038: juniper - denial of service on deeply nested fragment requests.
• RUSTSEC-2022-0035: websocket - unbounded memory allocation based on untrusted length.
• CVE-2022-31146: wasmtime - use after frees with externrefs
• CVE-2022-31162: slack-morphism - Slack Morphism for Rust before 0.41.0 can accidentally leak Slack OAuth client information in application debug logs.
• CVE-2022-31169: cranelift - Cranelift vulnerable to miscompilation of constant values in division on AArch64.

 

Most Active in July

Sui: 459 merged PRs, 120 closed issues, 158 open issues

Aptos: 453 merged PRs, 28 closed issues, 67 open issues

Parity: 360 merged PRs, 124 closed issues, 94 open issues

Solana: 327 merged PRs, 93 closed issues, 73 open issues

Fuel: 225 merged PRs, 203 closed issues, 142 open issues

 

Project Updates

Aleo

65 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 8 closed issues (1, 2), 11 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

• Announcing Aleo Testnet 3

Anoma

8 merged PRs (1, 2), 18 closed issues (1), 1 open issues (1)

Aptos

453 merged PRs (1), 28 closed issues (1), 67 open issues (1)

• Aptos Incentivized Testnet 2 | Highlights and Updates

Casper

58 merged PRs (1, 2), 52 closed issues (1, 2), 25 open issues (1, 2)

ChainSafe

84 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 66 closed issues (1, 2), 30 open issues (1)

COMIT

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

Concordium

13 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 26 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 14 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Conflux

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

DarkFi

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

Dfinity

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

• InfinitySwap Launches Enhanced CDK for Rust Canisters

Dusk Network

10 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 8 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 7 open issues (1)

• Dusk Network Launches Testnet 2.0, Upgraded Staking Contract Goes Live With 100+ Nodes.

Elrond

48 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 5 closed issues (1), 0 open issues

Espresso Systems

29 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 22 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 16 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

• VERI-ZEXE: Decentralized Private Computation with Universal Setup

Filecoin

22 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 10 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 16 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

• SnarkPack v2: A New Version of Filecoin’s Proof Aggregator
• How does the Network Indexer work?
• Retrieval Markets Rollup H1 2022
• Filecoin v16 Network Upgrade: Skyr

Findora

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

• Optimizing Findora’s TPS on Its EVM Layer
• FinDAOra | Validator Tutorial

Fluence

26 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 1 closed issues (1), 1 open issues (1)

Fuel

225 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11), 203 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), 142 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Golem

19 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 18 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 60 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Grin

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

Helium

12 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 6 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 5 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Holochain

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

IOTA

224 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 62 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 32 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Maidsafe

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

MobileCoin

34 merged PRs (1), 7 closed issues (1, 2), 13 open issues (1)

NEAR

125 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 27 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 26 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Nervos

119 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), 5 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 11 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Oasis

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

Parity

360 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), 124 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), 94 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)

Radix

95 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 8 closed issues (1, 2), 0 open issues

Secret Network

21 merged PRs (1), 33 closed issues (1), 52 open issues (1)

• SCRT Labs Development Update: August 2022

Solana

327 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 93 closed issues (1, 2), 73 open issues (1, 2)

Subspace Labs

62 merged PRs (1), 8 closed issues (1), 15 open issues (1)

Sui

459 merged PRs (1, 2), 120 closed issues (1, 2), 158 open issues (1, 2)

Zcash

48 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 28 closed issues (1, 2), 43 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

 

Rust in Bitcoin

• Fedimint made a big splash this month with their Minimint node, written in Rust.
• Eye of Satoshi 0.1.1, which includes a Rust CLN watchtower.
• BDK 0.20, containing new signing options and ways to discourage fee sniping.
• LDK 0.0.110 - “Routing, With a Vengeance”
• LNP/BP released Storm, an L3 decentralized storage and messaging protocol that builds on Lightning

For discussion join the Rust in Bitcoin Telegram group.

BDK

31 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 24 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 20 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

• Get block hash by its height
• Avoid using immature coinbase inputs

Bitmask

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

Electrs

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

LDK

43 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 11 closed issues (1), 12 open issues (1, 2, 3)

• LDK - Introducing Phantom Node Payments
• Payment Probing

LNP/BP

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

LNP WG

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

Nomic

3 merged PRs (1, 2), 5 closed issues (1, 2), 14 open issues (1)

RGB

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

Rust Bitcoin

44 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 19 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 17 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

• Sorting public keys according to BIP383
• LockTime enum for nLockTime and BIP65 OP_CHECKLOCKTIME fields

Rust Simplicity

5 merged PRs (1), 0 closed issues, 3 open issues (1)

Sapio

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

Talaia

12 merged PRs (1), 4 closed issues (1), 6 open issues (1)

If we’ve missed any other notable Rust Bitcoin projects or ecosystems, feel free to contribute!

 

Rust in Ethereum

Ethers-rs

57 merged PRs (1), 17 closed issues (1), 6 open issues (1)

Foundry

141 merged PRs (1), 143 closed issues (1), 69 open issues (1)

Lighthouse

8 merged PRs (1, 2), 38 closed issues (1), 11 open issues (1, 2)

• High-priority release: Slippy
• Medium-priority release: Galactic Federation President

Rust Ethereum

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

Rust Web3

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

zkSync

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

• 100 Days to Mainnet

If we’ve missed any other notable Rust Ethereum projects or ecosystems, feel free to contribute!

 

Events

Aug 7-9 | Online, Las Vegas, US

Zcon3

Aug 10-12 | Matsue city, Shimane, Japan

The 4th International Conference on Science of Cyber Security (SciSec 2022)

Aug 13-18 | Santa Barbara, CA, US

Crypto 2022

Aug 29-31 | Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University

SBC'22: The Science of Blockchain Conference 2022

Sep 12-14 | Radialsystem, Berlin

Developer Conference for Ethereum Infrastructure and Dapps

Sep 15 | Berlin, Germany

zkSummit 8

Sep 28-29 | Online, NYC, US

SmartCon 2022

Oct 7-16 | Bogota, Colombia

Devcon Week

Oct 28-30 | Lisbon, Portugal

ETH Lisbon

Nov 7-10 | Chicago, USA

TCC 2022

Nov 10-11 | Dubai, United Arab Emirates

ICSCB 2022: 16. International Conference on Smart Contracts and Blockchain

 

Careers

Check open positions 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 ❤️