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

Nikolai Shelekhov — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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</h2>
What draws me to Rust is not hype.
It’s:

Memory safety without garbage collection</li>
Zero-cost abstractions</li>
Explicit control over performance</li>
Deterministic behavior</li>
Strong type-driven design</li> </ul>
Rust feels like systems programming done correctly.
That foundation matters more to me than the domain.
Blockchain — But Only at the Right Layer</h2>
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</li>
Building the platform itself</li> </ul>
I’m interested in the second.
Why Polkadot</h2>
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</h2>
I am drawn to:

Runtime design</li>
Consensus-adjacent components</li>
Performance-critical infrastructure</li>
Cross-chain execution logic</li>
State machine design</li> </ul>
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</h2>
My focus is clear:

Deep systems programming in Rust</li>
Blockchain infrastructure (not application layer)</li>
Preferably within the Polkadot ecosystem</li> </ul>
That doesn’t invalidate other paths.
It just reflects what I value.
Why This Matters</h2>
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.