Building a Solana-like validator in Rust: what PoH, Tower BFT and Sealevel actually force you to think about
TL;DR TrustNode is a from-scratch Solana-style cluster in Rust: a verified Proof-of-History clock, Tower BFT-style consensus, a Sealevel-like parallel execution engine, gossip, and erasure-coded block recovery. The point was never to clone Solana — it's that these three subsystems force concrete, painful design decisions that generic "blockchain in Rust" tutorials skip. This is what they actually force. The naive description — "hash a counter, publish a chain of hashes" — is one line. The real…