Introducing hive-rs: A Rust Client Library for Hive

I’m excited to share hive-rs, a new Rust library for building on the Hive blockchain.

If you’ve used dhive in JavaScript, the goal here should feel familiar: a practical, typed client that makes common Hive workflows easier while staying close to real RPC behavior.

Why I Built It

Rust has become my default for systems that need reliability, performance, and explicit error handling. Hive has a great ecosystem in JavaScript and Python, but I wanted a native Rust option that I could trust in production services.

Node.js is great because it's accessible, but if you want better performing and reliable apps that are always on (like apps that stream the Hive blockchain) you want a language like Rust which is honestly better suited to things like this than Node.js.

Surprisingly, there was no existing Hive client for Rust.

The goals for hive-rs were:

Keep API ergonomics clean and predictable
Provide strong typing for common payloads
Handle real-node quirks without surprising failures
Make signing + broadcasting straightforward
Stay friendly for both scripts and long-running services

What hive-rs Includes Today

At a high level:

Typed clients for core namespaces (database, broadcast, blockchain, hivemind, rc, account_by_key, transaction_status)
Transaction creation, serialization, signing, and ID generation
Key utilities (WIF, public key derivation, signing/verification)
RC estimation helpers
Block and operation streaming helpers
Multi-node failover transport with backoff

Reliability Improvements From Real-World Testing

During launch testing against public nodes, a few compatibility edge cases showed up.

Instead of hiding them in app-level workarounds, I moved those fixes into the library:

Failover now retries only retryable transport failures (timeouts/network), and no longer masks non-transport errors as AllNodesFailed
AccountByKeyApi::get_key_references falls back to legacy condenser_api when appbase variants are unsupported
TransactionStatusApi::find_transaction falls back to condenser_api.get_transaction when transaction_status_api is unavailable
BroadcastApi::send now attempts synchronous broadcast first, then falls back to async broadcast + confirmation lookup when needed
Account reputation parsing now handles both string and numeric encodings from nodes

These changes were backed by new tests and full suite verification.

Quick Example

use hive_rs::{Asset, Client, PrivateKey, Result, TransferOperation};

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let client = Client::new_default();
    let active_key = PrivateKey::from_wif("")?;

    let confirmation = client
        .broadcast
        .transfer(
            TransferOperation {
                from: "alice".to_string(),
                to: "bob".to_string(),
                amount: Asset::from_string("0.001 HIVE")?,
                memo: "hello from rust".to_string(),
            },
            &active_key,
        )
        .await?;

    println!("tx id: {}", confirmation.id);
    Ok(())
}