Blockchain or Rust? Why I Choose Both — On My Terms

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A few months ago, I was asked in an interview:

“What do you love more — Rust or blockchain?”

My answer was immediate.

Rust comes first.

But not just any Rust work — deep, idiomatic, systems-level Rust programming.

Rust First

What draws me to Rust is not hype.

It’s:

  • Memory safety without garbage collection
  • Zero-cost abstractions
  • Explicit control over performance
  • Deterministic behavior
  • Strong type-driven design

Rust feels like systems programming done correctly.

That foundation matters more to me than the domain.

Blockchain — But Only at the Right Layer

If I work in blockchain, it has to be infrastructure.

Not smart contracts. Not application-layer glue code. Not framework-heavy abstraction stacks.

There is a fundamental difference between:

  • Building on top of someone else’s platform
  • Building the platform itself

I’m interested in the second.

Why Polkadot

Polkadot stands out for one specific reason:

It is pure Rust.

Substrate is not a thin wrapper around another runtime. It is not macro-driven sugar hiding complexity. It exposes the machinery.

You write runtime logic. You design state transitions. You control storage. You reason about determinism.

It feels like systems engineering — not scripting on-chain.

That alignment matters.

Infrastructure Over Applications

I am drawn to:

  • Runtime design
  • Consensus-adjacent components
  • Performance-critical infrastructure
  • Cross-chain execution logic
  • State machine design

Not UI. Not token launches. Not yield optimizers.

I want to work on the systems that make everything else possible.

The Boundary I’ve Drawn

My focus is clear:

  • Deep systems programming in Rust
  • Blockchain infrastructure (not application layer)
  • Preferably within the Polkadot ecosystem

That doesn’t invalidate other paths.

It just reflects what I value.

Why This Matters

Careers compound.

If you spend years writing surface-level abstractions, you become good at surface-level abstractions.

If you spend years designing deterministic state machines, optimizing performance, and reasoning about low-level invariants,

you become something else entirely.

I choose the latter.

Rust is the constant. Blockchain is optional — but only when it allows Rust to be used at its full depth.

That’s the line I’ve drawn.