Kash On Rust: The Future of Decentralized Stablecoin Payments

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Please note that Rusty Kash is currently in the development stage and not yet in Alpha. It may exhibit instability, and significant mining activities are advised against at this stage. We recommend joining our Kash Discord Server for updates.

Welcome to the Rust-based implementation of the Kash full-node and its ancillary libraries. Rusty Kash, a groundbreaking cryptocurrency, is developed with a focus on establishing the purest form of decentralized stablecoin payments. We are proud that Rusty Kash is developed based on Rusty Kaspa, leveraging its advanced blockchain technology. Our project is in an active development phase, ensuring continuous alignment with Rusty Kaspa's updates to guarantee state-of-the-art features and security.

We invite developers and blockchain enthusiasts to collaborate, test, and optimize our Rust implementation. Each line of code here is an opportunity to contribute to the open-source blockchain movement, shaping a platform designed for scalability and speed without compromising on decentralization.

Installation

Building on Linux

1. Install general prerequisites

   sudo apt install curl git build-essential libssl-dev pkg-config 

2. Install Protobuf (required for gRPC)

   sudo apt install protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev #Required for gRPC

3. Install the clang toolchain (required for RocksDB and WASM secp256k1 builds)

   sudo apt-get install clang-format clang-tidy \
   clang-tools clang clangd libc++-dev \
   libc++1 libc++abi-dev libc++abi1 \
   libclang-dev libclang1 liblldb-dev \
   libllvm-ocaml-dev libomp-dev libomp5 \
   lld lldb llvm-dev llvm-runtime \
   llvm python3-clang

4. Install the rust toolchain

   If you already have rust installed, update it by running: rustup update

5. Install wasm-pack

   cargo install wasm-pack

6. Install wasm32 target

   rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

7. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/Kash-Protocol/rusty-kash
   cd rusty-kash

Building on Windows

1. Install Git for Windows or an alternative Git distribution.

2. Install Protocol Buffers and add the bin directory to your Path

3. Install LLVM-15.0.6-win64.exe

   Add the bin directory of the LLVM installation (C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin) to PATH

   set LIBCLANG_PATH environment variable to point to the bin directory as well

   IMPORTANT: Due to C++ dependency configuration issues, LLVM AR installation on Windows may not function correctly when switching between WASM and native C++ code compilation (native RocksDB+secp256k1 vs WASM32 builds of secp256k1). Unfortunately, manually setting AR environment variable also confuses C++ build toolchain (it should not be set for native but should be set for WASM32 targets). Currently, the best way to address this, is as follows: after installing LLVM on Windows, go to the target bin installation directory and copy or rename LLVM_AR.exe to AR.exe.

4. Install the rust toolchain

   If you already have rust installed, update it by running: rustup update

5. Install wasm-pack

   cargo install wasm-pack

6. Install wasm32 target

   rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

7. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/Kash-Protocol/rusty-kash
   cd rusty-kash

Building on Mac OS

1. Install Protobuf (required for gRPC)

   brew install protobuf

2. Install llvm.

   The default XCode installation of llvm does not support WASM build targets. To build WASM on MacOS you need to install llvm from homebrew (at the time of writing, the llvm version for MacOS is 16.0.1).

   brew install llvm

   NOTE: Homebrew can use different keg installation locations depending on your configuration. For example:

   • /opt/homebrew/opt/llvm -> /opt/homebrew/Cellar/llvm/16.0.1
   • /usr/local/Cellar/llvm/16.0.1

   To determine the installation location you can use brew list llvm command and then modify the paths below accordingly:

   % brew list llvm
   /usr/local/Cellar/llvm/16.0.1/bin/FileCheck
   /usr/local/Cellar/llvm/16.0.1/bin/UnicodeNameMappingGenerator
   ...

   If you have /opt/homebrew/Cellar, then you should be able to use /opt/homebrew/opt/llvm.

   Add the following to your ~/.zshrc file:

   export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/bin:$PATH"
   export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/lib"
   export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/include"
   export AR=/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/bin/llvm-ar

   Reload the ~/.zshrc file

   source ~/.zshrc

3. Install the rust toolchain

   If you already have rust installed, update it by running: rustup update

4. Install wasm-pack

   cargo install wasm-pack

5. Install wasm32 target

   rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

6. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/Kash-Protocol/rusty-kash
   cd rusty-kash

Building WASM framework

Rust WebAssembly (Wasm) refers to the use of the Rust programming language to write code that can be compiled into WebAssembly, a binary instruction format that runs in web browsers. This allows for easy development using JS/TS while retaining the benefits of Rust.

The library can be build in for NodeJS, React Native and as an ES6 Module

NodeJS

cd rusty-kash
cd wasm
./build-node
cd nodejs
npm install

React Native

cd rusty-kash
cd wasm
./build-react-native

ES6

cd rusty-kash
cd wasm
./build-web

This will produce a folder: "nodejs", "web" or "react-native" library in `/wasm` directory depending on your selection.

Wallet CLI

cd cli
cargo run --release

Wallet CLI is now available via the /cli or /kos projects. For KOS, please see kos/README.md

Local Web Wallet

Run an http server inside of wallet/wasm/web folder. If you don't have once, you can use the following:

cd wallet/wasm/web
cargo install basic-http-server
basic-http-server

The basic-http-server will serve on port 4000 by default, so open your web browser and load http://localhost:4000

The framework is compatible with all major desktop and mobile browsers.

Running the node

Start a mainnet node

cargo run --release --bin kashd

Start a testnet node

cargo run --release --bin kashd -- --testnet

wRPC

wRPC subsystem is disabled by default in kashd and can be enabled via:

JSON protocol:

--rpclisten-json = <interface:port>

Borsh protocol:

--rpclisten-borsh = <interface:port>

Sidenote:

Rusty Kash integrates an optional wRPC subsystem. wRPC is a high-performance, platform-neutral, Rust-centric, WebSocket-framed RPC implementation that can use Borsh and JSON protocol encoding.

JSON protocol messaging is similar to JSON-RPC 1.0, but differs from the specification due to server-side notifications.

Borsh encoding is meant for inter-process communication. When using Borsh both client and server should be built from the same codebase.

JSON protocol is based on Kash data structures and is data-structure-version agnostic. You can connect to the JSON endpoint using any WebSocket library. Built-in RPC clients for JavaScript and TypeScript capable of running in web browsers and Node.js are available as a part of the Kash WASM framework.

wRPC to gRPC Proxy is deprecated and no longer supported.

Mining

Mining is currently supported only on testnet, so once you've setup a test node, follow these instructions.

1. Download and unzip the latest binaries bundle of Kash-Protocol/kashd.

2. In a separate terminal run the Kash-Protocol/kashd miner:

   kashminer --testnet --miningaddr kashtest:qrcqat6l9zcjsu7swnaztqzrv0s7hu04skpaezxk43y4etj8ncwfk308jlcew
   

   This will create and feed a DAG with the miner getting block templates from the node and submitting them back when mined. The node processes and stores the blocks while applying all currently implemented logic. Execution can be stopped and resumed, the data is persisted in a database.

   You can replace the above mining address with your own address by creating one as described here.

Benchmarking & Testing

Simulation framework (Simpa)

Logging in kashd and simpa can be filtered by either:

The current codebase supports a full in-process network simulation, building an actual DAG over virtual time with virtual delay and benchmarking validation time (following the simulation generation).

To see the available commands

cargo run --release --bin simpa -- --help

The following command will run a simulation to produce 1000 blocks with communication delay of 2 seconds and 8 BPS (blocks per second) while attempting to fill each block with up to 200 transactions.

cargo run --release --bin simpa -- -t=200 -d=2 -b=8 -n=1000

Heap Profiling

Heap-profiling in kashd and simpa can be done by enabling heap feature and profile using the --features argument

cargo run --bin kashd --profile heap --features=heap

It will produce {bin-name}-heap.json file in the root of the workdir, that can be inspected by the dhat-viewer

Tests

Run unit and most integration tests

cd rusty-kash
cargo test --release
// or install nextest and run

Using nextest

cd rusty-kash
cargo nextest run --release

Benchmarks

cd rusty-kash
cargo bench

Logging

Logging in kashd and simpa can be filtered by either:

1. Defining the environment variable RUST_LOG

2. Adding the --loglevel argument like in the following example:

   (cargo run --bin kashd -- --loglevel info,kash_rpc_core=trace,kash_grpc_core=trace,consensus=trace,kash_core=trace) 2>&1 | tee ~/rusty-kash.log
   

   In this command we set the loglevel to INFO.