RiB Newsletter #44

February 01, 2023

Welcome to the #44 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the monthly newsletter about Rust, distributed systems, cryptography, and other industry topics. Previous: #43.

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: camilahanada, gcharang, Kadan Stadelmann, Paul d’Aoust, Vid Kersic, 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…

openmina.

This is a Rust implementation of Mina, a blockchain that uses SNARKs to validate the state of the blockchain without storing the blockchain itself. The distinguishing feature of this implementation is that it runs as WASM directly in a web browser, peering with other nodes via WebRTC and presenting a wallet UI, where most wallets require a semi-trusted RPC intermediary.

The ability to run completely in the browser has been a tantalizing promise of Mina, but with the primary codebase written in OCaml hadn’t previously materialized. This implementation was described recently in a blog post. It appears to be a different Rust implementation than the previous mina-rs.

Interesting Things

Blog Posts

Papers

Projects

Ordinals. A project that “imbues satoshis with numismatic value, allowing them to collected and traded as curios.”
AES Encryption circuit. ZK-SNARK circuit to prove that a given ciphertext is the correct AES-128 encryption using a certain secret key.
TFHE-rs. A pure Rust implementation of TFHE for boolean and small integer arithmetics over encrypted data.
aa-bundler. EIP-4337 (Account Abstraction) - Bundler implementation in Rust.
merkle_patricia_tree. Patricia Merkle Tree implementation in Rust.
heimdall-rs. An advanced EVM toolkit that aims to make dealing with smart contracts on EVM based chains easier.
cosmwasm-vm. Experimental, minimalistic, no_std friendly abstract virtual machine for CosmWasm contracts execution. Blog post: How we built a generalized CosmWasm VM.
zk-benchmarking. A suite of benchmarks designed to compare different zero-knowledge proof libraries. Blog post: ZK System Benchmarking.
ezkl. A library and command-line tool for doing inference for deep learning models and other computational graphs in a zk-SNARK.
poseidon-circuit. Poseidon hash circuit and primitives. It integrated several Poseidon hash schemes from Zcash and iden3 and support sponge progress for hashing messages at any length.
starknet_in_rust. A Rust implementation of Starknet by LambdaClass.
Aurora Engine. EVM on the NEAR Protocol.

Security Advisories

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

Most Active in January

Sui: 567 merged PRs, 94 closed issues, 124 open issues

Parity: 454 merged PRs, 150 closed issues, 149 open issues

Starkware: 452 merged PRs, 8 closed issues, 11 open issues

Solana: 401 merged PRs, 137 closed issues, 60 open issues

Fuel: 322 merged PRs, 259 closed issues, 134 open issues

Project Updates

Aleo

49 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 114 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 11 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Anoma

83 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 92 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 37 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Aptos

231 merged PRs (1), 110 closed issues (1), 56 open issues (1)

Governance-based contract upgrades on Aptos

Casper

62 merged PRs (1, 2), 57 closed issues (1, 2), 36 open issues (1, 2)

COMIT

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

Concordium

60 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 23 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 21 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Conflux

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

DarkFi

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

Dfinity

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

Dusk Network

22 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 19 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 16 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Espresso Systems

31 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 32 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 27 open issues (1, 2)

Open Sourcing HyperPlonk

Filecoin

221 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), 195 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 153 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Findora

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

Fluence

119 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 0 closed issues (), 2 open issues (1, 2)

Fuel

322 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), 259 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), 134 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Golem

16 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 53 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 28 open issues (1)

Helium

16 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 9 closed issues (1), 0 open issues ()

Holochain

81 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 16 closed issues (1, 2), 6 open issues (1, 2)

Holochain reached a maturity milestone in January with its 0.1.0 beta release, which comes with a six-month freeze on breaking changes. They’ve also recently released the first version of a CLI-driven dApp scaffolding tool similar to Rails’ scaffolder.