Cardano, the platform underpinning ADA, the ninth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is opening its doors to third-party developers through a new client, written in systems programing language Rust.“As a project matures and grows, you need to satisfy the demands of different clients,” Charles Hoskinson, CEO at IOHK, the blockchain development company behind Cardano, told Bitcoin Magazine. IOHK made the announcement on October 1, 2018, exactly one year after it launched Byron, the first version of Cardano’s settlement layer, which was built in the functional programming language Haskell. While Haskell works well for mission-critical code, Rust shines in areas like mobile, where performance matters. Rust was created by Mozilla for Firefox as a replacement for C++. It is worth noting that Cardano, a proof-of-stake blockchain, is currently centralized with all of its blocks being produced by IOHK. But the project hopes to change that in Q1 2019 when its Shelley release opens up staking pools to users. (Shelley was originally slated for Q2 2018.) At its core, Cardano’s Rust project is a software development kit for the Cardano blockchain. It has several ingredients needed to interact with the blockchain, including data types like blocks, transactions and addresses, along with protocol functions to query blocks, send transactions and so on. The Github repository describes the project as a toolbox of Carda...
