Welcome to the #7 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the hypest newsletter about the hypest tech. Previous: #6.

This month we see a trend, in blockchain and across the Rust ecosystem, of projects quickly picking up stable async/await support and migrating to tokio 0.2.

For those interested in a great overview of the future distributed-web landscape, Kyle Samani of Multicoin Capital published a new edition of their “The Web3 Stack”. Not Rust-specific, but an evocative, illustrated, piece describing their vision of what a distributed world-wide-web, built on blockchain technology, could look like.

Rust in Blockchain has been expanding our coverage steadily over the months, and this month we begin covering Zcash, and COMIT.

With so many Rust blockchain projects of note it is increasingly challenging to report on all of them. If you are a passionate observer of any Rust blockchain project we need your help to gather the monthly updates. Please contact us on the Telegram group, or email us directly at hello@rustinblockchain.org if you are willing to donate an hour of your time each month.

Happy blockchain new year, Rustaceans!

Project spotlight

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

Zebra.

Zebra is an implementation of Zcash in Rust. It also appears to be the future of Zcash.

Originally developed by Parity, based off their bitcoin client, for the Zcash Foundation, Zebra was announced in July 2019. In late August development was begun from scratch, to take advantage of modern Rust idioms, to divorce the design from that of bitcoin, and to use a different license. The current version of Zebra is developed by long-time Rust cryptographer Henry de Valence, co-author of a number of high-profile Rust cryptography libraries, and expert in zero-knowledge proofs.

So now there are two Rust implementations of Zcash, including parity-zcash (which presumably inherits the original Zebra codebase).

According to the Zcash Foundation roadmap, in the future Zebra will be “the bedrock of our engineering output”. So it seems like Zcash is all-in on Rust!

Rust is awesome for blockchain, y’all.

Most Active in December

Solana: 343 merged PRs, 88 closed issues.

Parity: 192 merged PRs (1, 2), 69 closed issues (1, 2).

COMIT: 113 merged PRs (1, 2), 40 closed issues (1, 2).

NEAR: 61 merged PRs, 18 closed issues.

Project updates

COMIT

113 merged PRs (1, 2), 40 closed issues (1, 2).

• Blog: Vision and Mission + 2020 goals
• PR: Make more use of async/await
• PR: Refactor toward more idiomatic async code
• PR: Use clarity instead of emerald-rs

Enigma

16 merged PRs, 1 closed issue.

• Announcing the Launch of Enigma’s First Networked Testnet!
• PR: Implement local signing of ethereum transactions inside the KM enclave

Grin

16 merged PRs, 4 closed issues.

• News: #78: Floonet hard fork successful
• News: #77: ASIC friendly > resistant
• News: #76: v3.0.0 betas are out
• News: 2019Q3 Funding Transparency Report
• News: We just donated ~.3BTC to the grin general development fund.
• Discussion: Could Bitcoin’s privacy benefit from Litecoin’s EB MimbleWimble proposal?
• PR: fix(TUI): selected column and row of table are now preserved during update by @JosephGoulden
• PR: fix(TUI): Fixed panic when changing order of items in TableView by @JosephGoulden

Interledger

23 merged PRs, 45 closed issues.

• Blog: Interledger 2020: Access
• Blog: Interledger 2020 – The Protocol to Connect Them All
• PR: Make Redis fully optional for ilp-node by @bstrie
• PR: Make HTTP and BTP outgoing tokens symmetric to incoming tokens by @gakonst

NEAR

61 merged PRs, 18 closed issues.

• News: Our Last Update in 2019
• Blog: Open Web
• Blog: 200 years of Advertising, Original Sin of the Internet & Impeding No Ads Society
• Video: Sharding vs No Sharding fireside chat: NEAR Protocol & Solana
• Video: “Layer 1 Blockchain Architecture”: NEAR Protocol Overview
• Video: App Chains vs. dApps on shards: Cosmos and NEAR
• Video: Blockchain Gaming: 2019 lessons and what to expect in 2020
• Video: Early Days in Blockchain App Layer
• Video: NEAR Lunch and Learn Ep. 07: Nightshade: Finality Gadget
• Video: NEAR Lunch and Learn Ep. 06: Pricing Model
• Video: NEAR Lunch and Learn Ep. 05: Accounts and Runtime
• Video: Whiteboard Series with NEAR | Ep: 31 Kevin Davis from Kava Labs
• Video: Whiteboard Series with NEAR | Ep: 30 David Vorick from Sia
• PR: Replace sodium with ed25519_dalek and sha2 by @ailisp
• PR: Add minimum gas price by @bowenwang1996
• PR: Retry failed parallel test sequentially by @ailisp

Nervos

28 merged PRs, 5 closed issues.

• News: Nervos Roadmap 2020
• News: Our Investment in Nervos
• News: ABC Wallet supports CKB!
• News: RFC: Nervos Ecosystem Grants Program
• News: Nervos CKB Development Update #26. CKB v0.26.1 has released; Released Neuron v0.26.0 bundle with embedded CKB node; Released alpha version Golang SDK.
• News: CKB Developer AMA #1 with Tannr
• Blog: Nervos’s Multi-Layer Architecture: Designed with Scalability in Mind
• Blog: The LatAm Community: a Growing Force in Blockchain
• Blog: Understanding the Nervos DAO and Cell Model
• Blog: How Nervos CKB Could Facilitate Non-Fungible Tokens
• Blog: The Smart Contract Risk in DeFi
• Video: How To Stake Nervos CKBytes | CKB DAO Tutorial
• Video: How To Mine Nervos CKB | No More GPU Mining – FPGA Mining Tutorial & Staking
• PR: Informational: CKB Transaction Structure by @doitian
• PR: Doc: add W^X Memory and exec syscall for CKB VM by @xxuejie

Oasis

8 merged PRs (1, 2), 0 closed issues (1, 2).

• News: Join the Oasis DevAccelerator Program
• Blog: What is My Data Worth? An article by Ruoxi Jia that discusses methods proposed in our recent AISTATS and VLDB papers that attempt to answer this question in the machine learning context.
• Blog: Developer Spotlight: Matt Johnson

Parity

192 merged PRs (1, 2), 69 closed issues (1, 2).

• News: Polymesh — Flexibility through Smart Extensions. Polymath and Parity collaborate on extending Substrate to provide rich interoperability between base layer runtime modules, and dynamically deployed smart contracts.
• News: The Foundation of a New Internet. A look at Web 3.0 with Polkadot — Cornell Blockchain.
• News: Kusama Upgrade Bulletin. Kusama is about to get a new logic core. Runtime version: 1031; Supported natively by Polkadot v0.7.10.
• News: We are planning to move Parity Ethereum to a DAO ownership & maintainer model. OpenEthereum will provide the basis for cross-org collaboration to ensure the codebase gets the attention it needs to realize its full potential.
• News: PolkaWorld Interview House to feature guest speakers and A look at Web 3.0 with Polkadot
• News: The Inspiration Behind Web3 Grant Winner Attic Lab’s Substrate Plugin
• Blog: Have a TEE with Polkadot
• Blog: Polkadot 2019
• Blog: Secure and Decentralized Polkadot Domain Name System
• Blog: Polkadot Consensus Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: GRANDPA, Part 3: BABE, Part 4: Security.
• Video: Sub0.1: Substrate Ecosystem Overview – Fredrik Harryson
• Video: Participating in Kusama with Logan Saether
• Podcast: How can non money tokens accrue value in crypto | Jack Platt, Polkadot.
• Repo: substrate-client-cli. Example command line utility for querying latest state from a substrate based chain.
• Slides: Plasm Network at Sub0.1. Plasm Network slide deck at Sub0.1. The Plasm team describes what they are working on and what they will implement on Plasm Network.

Solana

343 merged PRs, 88 closed issues.

• Blog: Solana in 2019: Growth, Development, and the Road to Mainnet
• Podcast: How Solana Works with Anatoly Yakovenko Ep #2
• Video: Solana & SKALE live podcast recording – Jack O’Holleran & Anatoly Yakovenko
• Video: Layer 1 Event ft. Solana, NEAR, Harmony, CODA, Nervos
• PR: Stabilize fn coverage by creating a clean room by @ryoqun
• PR: Check for incorrect hash value on snapshot ingest by @ryoqun
• PR: Improve bench-tps stability by @jstarry
• PR: Update “limit-ledger-size” to use DeleteRange for much faster deletes by @sagar-solana
• PR: Strictly sanitize mmapped AppendVec file contents by @ryoqun
• PR: Add SystemInstruction::CreateAccountWithSeed by @rob-solana

Zcash

28 merged PRs (1, 2), 12 closed issues (1, 2).

The news this month is dominated by a poll on how to fund future Zcash development.

• Blog: ZF Grants 2.0. Zcash loves Rust. Zcash has grants.
• Blog: Zcash developers update 12-6-19
• News: Cryptocurrency 101 in the Bronx. From The New Yorker.
• News: Zcash Foundation update November 21 – December 13, 2019
• Blog: Blossom upgrade improves speed, scalability, and compatibility
• Blog: Community sentiment polling results. Results of polling the community on funding future Zcash development.
• Blog: Supporting a path for NU4. More about funding.
• Blog: Presenting a modified ZIP 1012. More about funding. ZIP 1012 is the proposal to continue funding Zcash.
• Blog: ECC response to Zcash community polling. On the future of Zcash funding.
• Blog: Dev Funds Should Be in Zcash, not United States Dollars. From the Electric Coin Company re the recent funding proposal.
• Blog: ECC transparency report for Q2 2019
• PR: Update transaction definition
• PR: Use redjubjub types in zebra-chain. redjubjub is another Zcash Rust project, part of the Zcash protocol.
• PR: Upgrade tokio, futures, hyper to released versions. Zebra is async/await.
• PR: Add ZIP 1014, based on ZIP 1012. An updated funding ZIP.

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