Welcome

The crypto/blockchain/web3 space has seen great adoption in recent years. The market cap of web3 has grown to $3 trillion from $5.2 billion in 2015. Since 2015 developer growth in the industry has grown by 40% year on year, with a 2023 survey finding 90% of businesses have begun using blockchain in some capacity. As the demands of the industry have grown, so has its appetite for programmers, and advanced and secure smart contract programming.

Rust is a programming language known for being free of garbage collection (except when you opt in), a great amount of flexibility and configuration, and a broad range of targets that it can be compiled down into, including Web Assembly (WASM), and Berkley Packet Filter (BPF).

This technical book for programmers will:

  • Introduce how a blockchain works from the perspective of a developer who doesn’t care about building one from scratch. Starting with what a distributed system is, and an accessible view of some cryptography.

  • Explain what a smart contract is. What transaction atomicity is, and how atomicity in the blockchain context is a transformative technology you should care about.

  • Introduce how you might use a smart contract in your daily life, today, with no theoreticals.

Then, finally:

  • How to build and test several contracts for Arbitrum, Solana, and NEAR. Introducing each chain, how they each work (including their storage models, and all of the relevant information for programmers).

  • Several smart contract examples that could be expanded upon. These examples include using popular defi applications of today. The focus will be on the Arbitrum ecosystem.

  • Closing remarks/what’s next advice that could be relevant for a developer entering the industry for the first time. Web3 is fertile ground for innovation, and teams are always hiring/VCs are always funding. I’ve included some tactical advice for programmers here.

The language of choice for all of this will be Rust, owing to its support in the various blockchains we’re featuring here. What’s a year in web3 is three years in traditional industry (or so they say), and the space is constantly undergoing a revolution, and new ways to build more expressive tools are constantly evolving. Rust is increasingly the lingua franca for experienced and intermediate programmers, and with this skillset in your toolkit, you’re well equipped to be at the forefront of whatever comes next.

Arbitrum is web3’s decentralised finance (defi)’s leader and is a “layer 2” blockchain that connects to Ethereum, Solana is a blockchain based on ideas of parallelism that’s known for its substantial community token ecosystem, and NEAR is a blockchain based on advanced scaling ideas that’s increasingly positioning itself as a technology for building AI. If this sounds like gobblygook to you, rest assured: we’ll be explaining what these chains are, and how they work, before introducing the technicalities.