Gustav Schauwecker: Nano's 2nd Language
One volunteer spent three and a half years rebuilding Nano's node software from scratch in a new language. Here's why that quietly made the network safer.
Every so often, a single volunteer quietly does something that makes an entire network measurably safer, and almost nobody outside that network’s core community ever hears the name. Gustav Schauwecker deserves better than that. Over roughly three and a half years, working largely alone, largely for free, and largely in public on a weekly livestream, he rebuilt the Nano cryptocurrency’s node software from the ground up in a completely different programming language, and in doing so gave one of crypto’s most technically interesting projects something many blockchains still struggle to get: real, independent client diversity.
Who He Is
Schauwecker is a Stuttgart, Germany based software engineer and the founder of Simpago, a software company. He is not a crypto newcomer chasing a trend. He is, by every indication, a career engineer who happened to fall in love with a specific hard problem: taking a piece of financial infrastructure that people around the world actually rely on, and making it more resilient.
The Project: RsNano
The Nano cryptocurrency’s original node software has always been written in C++, a language capable of extraordinary performance but also, famously, one that makes it easy to introduce the kind of subtle, dangerous bugs that have quietly sunk plenty of software projects: buffer overflows, dangling pointers, race conditions, integer overflows. On May 10, 2021, Schauwecker started what he described at the time as a hobby project: RsNano, a complete, from scratch reimplementation of the Nano node written entirely in Rust, a language purpose built to catch entire categories of those bugs at compile time, before the code ever ships.
What followed was an unusually transparent, unusually patient act of software engineering. Schauwecker livestreamed much of the porting process on YouTube and Twitch, week after week, inviting anyone curious to watch a production grade blockchain client get rebuilt piece by piece in real time. The Nano community pitched in along the way. A contributor named Rui put in substantial effort on the project, and a developer named Fiono ported components like the gap cache and unchecked map during an internship. Schauwecker pushed through real setbacks, including a severe herniated disc in early 2023 that sidelined him from sitting or standing for months, and simply came back and kept going once he’d recovered.
On November 18, 2024, three years, six months, and eight days after he started, Schauwecker announced that RsNano had reached 100 percent Rust. Every remaining line of C++ glue code was gone. What had started as a side project was now a complete Nano node written entirely in Rust. Seven months later, on June 13, 2025, RsNano v1.0 shipped, after more than 7,000 commits and roughly 100,000 lines of code. It was compatible with the C++ node and its database format, though its own release notes called it bleeding edge, and the project has kept shipping updates since.
Why This Actually Matters
It’s worth being precise about why this is a genuinely significant accomplishment rather than just an impressive personal project. Many blockchains, including some of the largest and best funded networks in crypto, lean heavily on one dominant node implementation. Ethereum has several independent clients, yet its own client diversity tracker shows Geth running about half of execution layer nodes and Lighthouse about half of consensus layer nodes, and warns that a bug in a client with a supermajority could be catastrophic. That’s a structural weak point: if a critical vulnerability is ever discovered in a dominant codebase, it can potentially be exploited across a large share of the network all at once. Ethereum has had to run an entire public campaign to encourage validators to spread out across clients.
Nano, thanks largely to one volunteer’s multi year effort, has a second implementation built in. Because RsNano is a completely independent codebase, written in a memory safe language with different underlying guarantees than C++, a hypothetical attack vector built to exploit a memory corruption bug in the original node would very likely have no effect on a node running RsNano, and vice versa. That is not a small thing. It’s the difference between a network with one lock on the door and a network with two different locks, and how much that helps in practice depends on how many representatives actually run each implementation. Rust’s compile time guarantees around memory safety and thread safety also mean an entire class of exploits, the kind that have caused real, expensive incidents elsewhere in software, simply cannot exist in the RsNano codebase in the first place.
The Bigger Picture
Gustav Schauwecker didn’t do this because a foundation paid him a bounty or because a venture fund handed him a grant with a deadline attached. He did it, by his own account, as a hobby, in public, for a network he clearly cares about, and he stuck with it through years of unglamorous, unpaid work and at least one serious health setback along the way. The result is a genuinely rare thing in this industry: a piece of critical infrastructure that is measurably more resilient today than it was five years ago, built entirely by volunteer effort and given away for free to a network of strangers. Whatever else gets written about Nano’s technology, its price history, or its place in the broader crypto landscape, this deserves its own line: one engineer, working mostly alone, made one of the world’s few genuinely feeless, instant cryptocurrencies meaningfully harder to break. That is a real accomplishment, and it deserves real credit.
This article is for informational purposes only and isn’t financial advice.