Description

Unlock Protocol's tooling ecosystem today is JS/TS-first (WordPress plugin, Webflow, Guild.xyz-style integrations). There is currently no native Rust SDK, which shuts out an entire class of builders: game servers, IoT/edge devices, CLI tools, and backend services written in Rust that want to token-gate access using Unlock memberships.

unlock-rs is a Rust client SDK that provides:

• Multi-chain RPC client with lock contract bindings (read lock metadata, price, currency, key balance)
• Membership/key verification (has_valid_key, expiration and renewal state)
• ERC20 price resolution across supported payment tokens
• Write operations: key purchase/grant flows and lock creation helpers
• Built-in transaction retry/backoff resilience layer (reused from my published circuit_breaker and daemon_rs crates), which the existing JS SDK does not offer
• A CLI tool (unlock-cli) for scripting lock/key queries from the terminal
• Example integrations, including a Discord bot for NFT-gated role management

The goal is to make Unlock trivially easy to integrate into any Rust-based backend, expanding the protocol's reach beyond the current JS ecosystem and giving Unlock a credible presence in the Rust/systems developer community.
I bring 8+ years of production Rust experience building reliability-focused infrastructure crates, so this SDK is designed to be dependable and production-ready from the first release, not a prototype.

Website URL

N/A

Twitter

@TheRustFanatic

Github

https://github.com/mahmudsudo

LinkedIn

https://linkedin.com/in/mahmud-b-613575207

Discord handle

mahmudsudo

Completion time

3 months

Team

Solo project. I'm a Rust/C++ systems engineer with 6+ years of production experience in distributed systems, protocol engineering, and developer tooling. I've published several open-source Rust crates focused on reliability and observability (circuit_breaker, daemon_rs, agenticrs, rate_rs), and contributed to protocol-level projects including Paradigm's Solar compiler and Ithacaxyz's Odyssey. I'm not looking for additional help at this stage , the milestone breakdown below is scoped for solo delivery within the timeframe.

Milestones

1. Core SDK — read operations (Month 1): Multi-chain RPC client, lock contract bindings, key/membership verification (has_valid_key, expiration checks), ERC20 price resolution. Deliverable: working crate with read-only API, published as a pre-release on crates.io.
2. Write operations + reliability layer (Month 2): Key purchase/grant flows, lock creation helpers, and a built-in retry/circuit-breaker layer for transaction resilience. Deliverable: full read/write API, dry-run/simulation mode for safe testing.
3. CLI, examples, docs & publish (Month 3): unlock-cli tool, example integrations (Discord bot, headless access-gate service), full rustdoc + usage guide, final crates.io publish under MIT/Apache-2.0. Deliverable: public v1.0 crate, documented and ready for community use.

Requested grant amount

Other amount, or not requesting UDT

Anything else you think we should know, including why you've requested a particular grant amount

The $20,000 ask covers roughly 3 months of solo, full-time development at a rate consistent with production Rust systems work. This is foundational infrastructure rather than a single-purpose integration once published, it lowers the barrier for any Rust-based project (backend services, CLI tools, game servers, IoT) to integrate Unlock, which compounds the protocol's reach beyond what a one-off integration would. I have direct precedent for this kind of scoped, milestone-based delivery: I've shipped similar infrastructure grants for other ecosystems (e.g., a monitoring daemon for Rocket Pool) reusing the same reliability-focused crates this SDK builds on, which de-risks timeline and quality.

Is your work Open Source

Yes, my project will use an Open Source license such as MIT

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct