Project rust_chain, is a simple, educational blockchain implementation in Rust. It demonstrates the fundamental concepts of blockchain technology, including creating blocks, managing a blockchain, and calculating Merkle proofs. This project is designed for educational purposes and serves as a foundation for understanding how blockchains work under the hood.
- Basic blockchain structure, block creation, chain verificaction
- Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm [Maybe TBD]
- Transaction management and processing
- CLI for interacting with the blockchain [Or Web UI TBD]
- Simple tests of chain integrity and Merkle proofs
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Rust programming environment (Rustup)
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Cargo (comes with Rustup installation)
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I used Eclipse on Ubuntu. You'll have to use apt or your favorite package manager tool to install the Rust development packages. I used synaptic.
- Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/rickenator/rust_chain.git
- Navigate to the project directory:
cd rust_chain
- Build the project:
cargo build --release
In Eclipse, install the Rust package from the market. The "Run" button will save files, compile and run your project.
To start the blockchain node and interact with the CLI:
cargo run
In main() the run_test() function will be called. You can modify the tests there as desired. Currently as configured, a file blockchain.json will be written when the blockchain goes out of scope at the end of the test. Subsequent runs of rust_chain will load this file and restore the previous state, so if you want to start from fresh, delete this file.
There are a number of print_json() that have been commented out for brevity from the console, and at some point of course we can have a better debugging log, but this is fine for now.
The mempool is hard coded so that after 4 transactions are added, a new block is created and the pool is drained by 4. In the current test, there are 8 additions and 1 extra "dangling" addition, that makes 2 blocks and an singleton transaction that gets properly persisted. Then if rust_chain is executed 4 times, there should be 8 more blocks and an additional block made of the previously dangling transactions with an empty pool.
This project is structured as follows:
src/main.rs: Entry point for the CLI application.src/blockchain.rs: Contains the core blockchain logic, including block creation and the Merkle tree algorithm.src/transaction.rs: Defines the transaction structure and how transactions are processed.src/block.rs: Defines the block structure and how blocks are created and validated.src/merkle_proof.rs: Implements the Merkle verifier against the tree.
Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit pull requests, report bugs, and suggest features.
This project is licensed under the GPLv2 License - see the LICENSE file for details.
- Special thanks to ChatGPT and Copilot. I knew not a line of Rust nor anything of depth about Blockchains prior to taking on this project. This took about 48 hours of work. I didn't understand a lot going on, but that was the idea. I could piece things together chunks at a time and get it to verifyably work. Afterwards I did a deep dive into what the language was doing, how a blockchain works and what it could be used for. A good learning experience, and overall I'd say Rust is very cool and want to learn more.