If you want to get one of the burgeoning jobs as a developerata crypto trading firm or exchange, there are two languages youneed to know.
One is Solidity. The other is Rust. Developers in either are in short supply.
Rob Lycett, a London-based recruiter who places software engineers in crypto firms, said the shortage of Solidity developers in particular is "frustrating." An object oriented language used to program contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, Solidity has taken off as use of Ethereum grows.Lycett says demand has been huge in the second half of 2021, but that Solidity developers are "very hard to find," and that clients are "desperate."
Unlike Solidity,Rust is not crypto specific. It's relatively under-used in major banks but is hyper-popular in crypto trading firms. "Rustwas just in the right place at the time," says Richard Hickling, the former trading floor technologist who now runs crypto analytics providerProfitView. "It's a high-performance compiled language designed to avoid some of the pitfalls of C (and thus C++), while being new and cool just as crypto was taking off."
Best comment picked by the author
Agree, an entry level support staff in IT at a major investment bank is on £60k so someone with actual skills should be on close to double that. Senior blockchain dev really should be getting £200k+.
Rust is used by Compound and by Bolt Labs among others. It's also beingspecified as a desirable language by Jump Trading as it builds out its crypto team. "You need to be disciplined to program in Rust," says the CTO ofone crypto payments firm. "It won't work properly if you don't do a good job, but it's modern and fast and compiles into a smaller executable."
Like Solidity, Rust can be used to write smart contracts (and is used on the Solana blockchain), but reflecting Ethereum's popularity, Solidity is thebetter used of the two: "Solidity is the Ethereum language so anyone in DeFi needs to get in top of it. It's the language for writing most smart contracts," says Hickling.
How hard is it to learn Solidity? Not at all, says the CTO: "If you know how to code already, it's not that difficult."
Lycett says the demand for Solidity coders is such that even-self taught people are being recruitedin London on salaries of£65k ($86k), while experienced developers can command up to£150k. The CTO says most seasoned Solidity developers are juggling multiple job offers. "It's necessary to offer more money or more interesting projects," he says. "- These are the key things."
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FAQs
It is not a replacement for Solidity, but a language to use when the highest level of security is required.
Is it better to learn Solidity or Rust? ›
Solidity is ideal for those familiar with JavaScript, while Soroban's Rust foundation offers advantages in concurrency and safety.
Does Solana use Rust or Solidity? ›
Programming languages
EVM primarily uses Solidity to write smart contracts, while Solana uses Rust. There is a framework called the Anchor framework that allows you to build in Rust with many of the tools you are familiar with from EVM, but it is still Rust.
What's the advantage of using languages like Rust for developing cryptographic code? ›
Security The Rust language is designed to provide optimal security for applications. Rust's programs are statically typed, detecting errors before compilation. Memory safety also enhances the security of the code.
Does Rust have any future? ›
Rust also has some plus points when it comes to building ML and AI applications that deal with complex data structures or do efficient memory management. In the Future There Will Be More Libraries And Toolkits Utilized For Rust That Are Intended For Scientific Computation Or Deep Learning Computation.
Will Rust make C obsolete? ›
Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure's CTO, tweeted that "it's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-GC language is required. For the sake of security and reliability. The industry should declare those languages as deprecated."
Should I learn Rust or go for blockchain? ›
One of the most essential requirements of blockchain networks is the high speed of operation within the web at a low level of server load. Many blockchains (e.g., Ethereum or Bitcoin) use C++ functionality to implement such conditions. Considering the above, creating infrastructure in Rust will be more effective.
What are the disadvantages of Solidity? ›
Disadvantages of Solidity
Like any language, Solidity has its drawbacks. Immutability of smart contracts: The immutability of smart contracts in Solidity, while beneficial in many cases, can pose challenges. Once a contract is deployed, it cannot be altered or improved, which can be problematic in dynamic environments.
Is Solana built on Solidity? ›
Solana programs are typically written in Rust using Anchor, Eth programs are written in Solidity. Solana uses a safe curve (Ed25519) rather than Secp256k1. Ethereum put executables and their data in the same location, Solana stores data items in PDAs, a big key/value store built into Solana.
Which blockchain uses Rust? ›
Polkadot
The Substrate framework is coded with the Rust programming language and allows to create blockchains like Polkadot. This shows that Polkadot would probably not exist without Rust. Rust also helps the blockchain in implementing its core runtime which is responsible for executing smart contracts.
Rust is a programming language that is well-suited for building smart contracts due to its emphasis on safety, concurrency, and performance. It enforces strict ownership and borrowing rules to prevent data races and other common bugs.
Is Ethereum written in Rust? ›
Solidity and Rust are the two main programming languages used by web3 developers to build web3 applications on Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible blockchains and Solana respectively.
Why not to use Rust programming language? ›
Rust isn't particularly good at correctness of programs compared to something like Agda, but it is much easier to write Rust programs than Agda programs. The sides of the tradeoff are problem domain complexity, runtime cost, programmer effort, and compile-time cost.
What is the best language for crypto? ›
Solidity (Ethereum and EVM-compatible platforms)
Solidity is the most popular crypto coding language in the world. It's the default option for smart contract programming on Ethereum and all EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) chains, including Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and others.
Is Rust gaining popularity? ›
Since the 1.0 release, Rust has exploded in popularity and adoption, with top applications, such as Microsoft Windows, utilizing Rust to rewrite core libraries with its memory-safe code.
Is Rust good for smart contracts? ›
Rust is a programming language that is well-suited for building smart contracts due to its emphasis on safety, concurrency, and performance.
Is Rust the future of machine learning? ›
A Growing Ecosystem for AI Development
Although Rust is relatively new to the AI scene, its ecosystem for AI and machine learning is rapidly growing. There are already libraries and tools available for tasks such as numerical computing, data manipulation, and machine learning.
Is Solidity still in demand? ›
Even if it doesn't, Solidity can still be used to increase the security of other blockchain platforms. As long as funds are exchanged on the blockchain, there will be a need for languages like Solidity. Still, there's no indication that EVM-based Defi projects will fade away anytime soon.
What is the future of Solidity programming? ›
Solidity is one of the most important programming languages of the future. As the world continues to move towards a decentralized economy, Solidity plays a crucial role in building the infrastructure needed to support this transition.
