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  • I Want to Become a Blockchain Engineer, Not Just a Smart Contract Developer — Should I Start with Solidity or Rust?

    AnitaSmartContractSensei

    AnitaSmartContractSensei

    @SmartContractSensei
    Updated: Nov 30, 2025
    Views: 2.0K

    I’m at a point in my blockchain journey where I need to choose a direction, and I genuinely don’t want to pick the wrong one. I’ve been a JavaScript developer for two years, but I don’t want to just write basic token contracts or follow tutorials. My long-term goal is to become a blockchain engineer — someone who understands systems, not just syntax.

    That’s where I’m stuck.

    Everyone around me keeps giving opposite advice. Some say, “Start with Solidity, it’s the easiest way to break into Web3.” Others say, “If you want real engineering depth, go straight to Rust. Solidity limits you later.”

    I’ve tried both enough to get confused:

    • Solidity felt more natural, but maybe too easy?

    • Rust felt powerful, but the ownership model completely threw me off.

    My worry is simple:
    If I choose the wrong entry point, I’ll waste the next 6–8 months and still not be closer to real blockchain engineering roles — whether that’s DeFi internals, L2 rollup work, or protocol-level development.

    For those who’ve walked this path or hired juniors:
    How did you decide which language aligned with your long-term growth?
    Is starting with Solidity a shortcut, or a ceiling?
    And does Rust actually open the doors people claim it does?

    Would love real stories, not surface-level opinions.

    5
    Replies
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Replies

  • SmartContractGuru

    @SmartContractGuru • 11mos

     started with Solidity mainly because it was the only thing that made sense to me in the beginning. The documentation felt familiar, the tooling was simple, and I could see results quickly. That early momentum helped a lot.

    When I moved to Rust later, the difference became obvious. Rust forces you to slow down and think about memory, safety, and how the system behaves underneath. That was stressful at first, but it made me a better engineer overall.

    If your goal is “engineering depth,” Solidity gives you confidence early, Rust sharpens your fundamentals later. I don’t regret doing it in that order.

  • SmartChainSmith

    @SmartChainSmith • 11mos

    From the hiring side, what I’ve noticed is pretty consistent: juniors who start with Solidity get into teams faster because they can contribute earlier. Juniors who start with Rust grow slower in the beginning but usually end up in roles where the engineering work is heavier.

    Both paths work, but they lead to different environments. If someone tells me they want protocol-level work or want to understand the internals of chains, Rust eventually becomes necessary. If they want to build products quickly, Solidity is usually enough.

  • ChainPenLilly

    @ChainPenLilly • 1w

    I work on protocol-side engineering, so maybe this helps you see the difference more clearly.

    The reason Rust feels “heavier” isn’t just the syntax or the compiler. It’s because Rust makes you think about things Solidity abstracts away: memory layout, ownership of data, lifetime of references, and how different parts of the system communicate. These things show up directly when you’re dealing with chain clients, state machines, consensus code, or validator logic. If you’re aiming for those areas, Rust forces you to build the mental model you’ll eventually need.

    Solidity sits one layer above that. You don’t manage memory manually. You don’t worry about concurrency risks. Your job is to reason about state transitions, contract boundaries, invariants, and security assumptions inside the EVM. It’s still engineering — just at the application layer, where the focus is correctness rather than system design.

    What I’ve seen is this: people who start with Solidity understand product flows and security patterns faster. People who start with Rust understand underlying mechanics deeper, but they take longer before they can ship something meaningful.

    So the question isn’t “Which is better?” It’s “Which layer do you want to work at first — application or system?”

    Once you decide that, the language choice becomes obvious.

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