Welcome to November, Rust blockchaineers. We hope you’ve been writing some great Rust. Though mostly not Rust-specific, the coolest stuff we’ve got for you this month are a bunch of interesting new papers on blockchain-related topics.

For the last few months we’ve been following new zero-knowledge proof projects in Rust. This month, with Secret Network upgrading their mainnet with secret contracts, it seems like a good opportunity to explore Rust blockchains that are using a completely different privacy-preserving technology: secure enclaves.

Rust blockchain development continued at its typical blistering pace, and again it’s impossible to follow everything going on. This month we see continued advancement in zero-knowledge computing, an obvious focus from the entire blockchain industry on the DeFi phenomenon, and new hackathons with opportunities for Rust developers.

This month, we’re seeing a bunch of interesting Rust blockchain and crypto projects. Elrond, appeared on our radar with the launch of their mainnet. Although not written in Rust, it runs Rust smart contracts on its Arwen WASM VM, which itself is based on the Rust Wasmer VM. Along with NEAR, Nervos, and Enigma (and probably others), this continues an encouraging trend of blockchains enabling smart contracts in Rust.

We are happy to announce that RiB is one year old – happy birthday to RiB! This is a late celebration. Since we released RiB’s first issue on June 6th, 2019, we have published 14 issues, along with 2 additional blog posts. With more than 20 contributors participating! The next issue is on the way, and we will publish it on next Wednesday. Contributions to the next draft are welcome.

This month, we don’t see a consistent blockchain Rust theme to highlight, but interesting new Rust crypto and blockchain projects continue to be launched. They are noted in the “Interesting Things” section.