This month we’re rewriting things in Rust. We are struck anew by the number of blockchains that either have alternative implementations in Rust, or that have rewritten their official implementations in Rust.

There are many blockchains written in Rust now, and quite a few blockchains that run Rust smart contracts. It’s hard to keep up, but we try. In this month’s newsletter we note 21 of them, but there are more than that.

It’s still a great time to be a Rust programmer. This month the Rust Foundation was announced, Kraken declared their love for Rust, and more Rust blockchains launched grant programs.

It’s a good time to be a skilled Rust programmer, especially for those of us into blockchain tech. This month we talked a lot about Rust smart contract platforms, including the possibility of creating a single Rust library that abstracts over multiple blockchain runtimes.

Since there’s not much else of note this month, let’s survey a topic that’s been on our minds recently: Rust and smart contracts. There are a number of blockchains that either run smart contracts written in Rust, or implement their smart contract runtimes or languages in Rust.

This month, Oasis launched its mainnet. The Ethereum 2 beacon chain also went live. Parity and NEAR released many good videos. RiB editor Brian keeps documenting his experiments with Rust-based smart contract platforms, and yet another first-impressions post.