ferrite 0.1.1

High-performance Rust-based signer for web3.py.

Ferrite: High-performance eth-account signer

High-performance Rust-based signer for eth-account

Ferrite is a Python module that dramatically accelerates Ethereum cryptographic operations by replacing the core signing logic in eth-account with a highly optimized Rust implementation.

Simply import the module, and your existing eth-account code will run significantly faster with zero code changes required.

---

Key Features

• Blazing Fast: Up to 50x faster than the standard eth-account implementation.
• Drop-in Replacement: Just import ferrite at the start of your application. No code refactoring is needed.
• Zero-Overhead: The patch is applied once on import, with no performance penalty during runtime.
• Reliable & Secure: Built on top of the same production-grade cryptographic libraries used in the wider Rust-Ethereum ecosystem.

Installation

pip install ferrite

Quickstart

Import ferrite at the top of your application's entrypoint. The module will automatically "monkey patch" the eth-account library.

Before Ferrite

# your_app.py
from eth_account import Account
from eth_account.messages import encode_defunct

private_key = "0x..." # Your private key
account = Account.from_key(private_key)
message = encode_defunct(text="hello world")

signed_message = account.sign_message(message)

print(f"Signature: {signed_message.signature.hex()}")

After Ferrite

# your_app.py
import ferrite  # <-- Just add this one line at the top!

from eth_account import Account
from eth_account.messages import encode_defunct

private_key = "0x..." # Your private key
account = Account.from_key(private_key)
message = encode_defunct(text="hello world")

signed_message = account.sign_message(message)

print(f"Signature: {signed_message.signature.hex()}")

Development & Contribution

This project is built using maturin.

Prerequisites

• Rust: Install via rustup
• Python: Version 3.8 or higher
• maturin: pip install maturin

Development Setup

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/satoshiburger/ferrite.git
   cd ferrite
   

2. Development Installation:

   maturin develop
   pip install pytest black mypy
   

3. Run Tests:

   python -m pytest
   cargo test
   

Project Structure

ferrite/
├── __init__.py # Main module interface and monkey patching
├── account.py  # Core patching logic for eth-account
└── lib.rs      # Rust implementation

Dependencies

• eth-account>=0.8.0,<0.9.0

Performance

Operation	Standard (Python)	Ferrite (Rust)	Improvement
Sign Message	~2.1ms	~0.04ms	50x faster
Sign Hash	~1.8ms	~0.03ms	60x faster

Performance measured on Intel i7-9750H, single-threaded. Results may vary.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.