announcement

The first batch of crates is now available on crates.io! I’ve been working on a lot of stuff during the last year, but being buried deep in the repository, the code is not easy to discover and reuse. I picked the first batch of crates that should be useful for the broader public and published them on crates.io with the hope to attract some users and contributors. All of these crates are completely independent and do not have dependencies on anything blockchain-specific in this repository. Most of them are no_std and do not even require an allocator. But wait, there is more! In many cases APIs are guaranteed to never ever panic (at compile time!). For example, Merkle Tree construction and verification have those guarantees. This is awesome for high reliability and compiler optimizations! A short “advertisement” for each of the crates follows below, all these crates are also now mentioned in the main readme in the repository. Note that most crates leverage Nightly Rust features heavily and may be unusable on Stable Rust (for now).

It has been around a year since the project started, and I would like to share a brief summary of what has happened so far, where the project is at and what’s coming next. I’ll only capture the highlights and key outcomes here, presented in rough chronological order.

Welcome post mentioned briefly initial set of constraints that led to the creation of this project, but I figured it might be helpful to have a short writeup about it that might be helpful for sharing. In short: we’re building a blockchain. By “we” I really mean just me and Alfonso so far, but I hope more people will join over time if they find it interesting.

The big change from the last update is that Alfonso de la Rocha has joined me as a part-time researcher to help with sharding designing. Code-wise, there were also a bunch of performance benchmarks and optimizations.

Hello, world 👋! This is the beginning of hopefully successful thing I call “Project Abundance”. After writing initial set of constraints and thinking about it for quite a while, it is finally time to dedicate all my time to it and see where it leads us.