Q1-Q2 2025 Recap from Rebecca Rumbul

July 11, 2025/Rebecca Rumbul

As we are now into the second half of 2025, it’s time to share a recap of Q1 and Q2. While we typically prefer to publish these updates on a quarterly basis, we opted to combine the reports for the first half of this year, due to shifting editorial responsibilities on our team–more on that below!

In this post, you’ll find a roundup of the Rust Foundation’s activities and achievements from January through June 2025. The last months brought important transitions and significant strategic progress across multiple workstreams for the Rust Foundation team. Here’s a look at what we’ve accomplished so far this year. 

Technology

The Rust Foundation continued to deepen its technical support for the Rust Project and the broader Rust ecosystem over the past few months.

In Q1, we were pleased to support the official transfer of the Ferrocene Language Specification (FLS) to the Rust Project by Rust Foundation Silver Member, Ferrous Systems—an important step toward a formal Rust language specification. 

Several of our engineers made strong progress toward trusted publishing and crate verification in Q1. Security Engineer Walter Pearce implemented a proof-of-concept for The Update Framework (TUF) covering crates.io and past Rust releases, which will support the 2025H1 verification and mirroring Rust Project goal. This infrastructure work complements the newly accepted RFC 3724. Walter’s implementation has been shared with stakeholders within the Rust project for review, testing, and discussion. 

Engineer Tobias Bieniek continued development work on crates.io, including modularizing the database access code and releasing a new OpenAPI description for third-party integration. He also published a six-month progress update summarizing improvements to publishing, notifications, crate deletion, and more.

In Q2, progress was made towards Trusted Publishing for crates.io. Tobias completed the main publishing pipeline, implemented the user interface, and added a “Trusted Publishing” section to crate settings where users can configure and manage GitHub Actions workflows as trusted publishers, complete with comprehensive documentation. 

Other activities include:

  • Infrastructure Engineer Marco Ieni reduced the monetary cost of the Rust Project’s CI by 76%. 
  • Software Engineer Tobias Bieniek joined the axum project as an official maintainer.
  • Software Developer Adam Harvey and Infrastructure Engineer Marco Ieni presented at Rust Nation 2025, covering crate security and release automation, respectively.
  • Adam also authored a blog for Alpha-Omega on Typomania, a tool for detecting typosquatting attacks on crates.io.
  • Walter and Adam are actively participating in various Alpha-Omega Project working groups, including Capslock, securing software repos, and more.
  • Members of the Foundation technology team attended Open Source Summit North America, OpenSSF Day, and various discussions and roundtables with members of Alpha-Omega.
  • Interoperability Engineer Jon Bauman attended the Open Source Finance Forum (FINOS) in London, presenting a talk about the potential to create greater safety for performance-critical applications within finance. 

Safety-Critical Rust Consortium

The second in-person convening of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium was held in London in February ahead of Rust Nation UK, bringing together over 30 participants. In May, the third full Consortium meeting was held at Rust Week. These meetings advanced planning for developer resources and outputs. Additionally, a new subcommittee was launched to align with other safety standards bodies such as MISRA and relevant government entities.

Interop Initiative

Rust-C++ Interoperability Engineer Jon Bauman represented the Rust Foundation at the ISO C++ WG21 meeting in Austria and facilitated a meeting between members of the Rust Project and the WG21 (C++ Committee) at Rust Week in May. These discussions laid the groundwork for smoother integration between C++ and Rust, in line with the Foundation’s previously published Interop Strategy. 

Communications, Marketing & Events

After many months of hard work and several periods of delay, we were thrilled to launch the new Rust Foundation website in January 2025. With improved accessibility, clearer messaging, and a central hub for Rust Foundation initiatives, the relaunch has been met with enthusiastic feedback from members and visitors alike.

Also in January, we published our 2024 Annual Report, which can be found here.

The mar-comms team devoted a huge amount of time to planning RustConf 2025, taking place September 2–5 in Seattle. Early this year, the Hyatt Regency in downtown Seattle was announced as the conference venue, with space to accommodate additional attendees, enhance accessibility, and offer an improved sponsor exhibition experience. 

Additionally, we formed a program committee to review talk submissions, launched and closed our call for proposals, published the conference schedule, announced speakers, began securing and onboarding sponsors, and opened up registration towards the end of June.

If your organization is interested in supporting our work or sponsoring RustConf 2025, we’d love to hear from you. Learn more about supporting RustConf 2025 via sponsorships here.

In Q2, we also secured a contract for our RustConf 2026 venue. Stay tuned for more details on next year’s event location and experience!

In addition to preparing for RustConf, the team represented the Foundation at several third-party events, including:

  • Rust Nation UK
  • Linux Foundation Member Summit
  • FOSDEM
  • ARM Open Source & AI Summit
  • FOSS Backstage
  • State of the Open Con
  • Rust Week NL
  • Open Source in Finance Forum
  • WG21
  • Open Source Summit North America

Beyond events, we were also particularly pleased to publish two important guest blog posts:

  • A guest blog post commemorating the 10th year since the first stable release of Rust from the original author of the Rust programming language, Graydon Hoare.
  • An update on our Security Initiative’s continued work supported by the Alpha-Omega Project.

Community Grants Program

We continue to grow our support for the Rust community through grantmaking and financial support initiatives, ensuring diverse voices can be present for important conversations about the Rust Project’s future.

In Q1 and Q2 of 2025, we issued:

  • One new Project Goal grant
  • Five Project Goal Fellowship extensions
  • Over 50 travel grants to support global participation in Rust Week 2025

Membership

Q1 and Q2 brought six new members into the Foundation:

  • Qube Research & Technologies (Silver Member)
  • Fledgio Limited (Silver Member)
  • The Tock Foundation (Associate Member)
  • Trifecta Tech Foundation (Associate Member)
  • OpenAtom Foundation (Associate Member)
  • The Tor Project (Associate Member)

Because membership growth directly impacts our ability to budget and deliver programs in 2026 and beyond, the Foundation is keen to see more membership growth in the months ahead. To support this goal, the team is actively developing a refreshed membership recruitment strategy.

Governance

Since the beginning of this year, there have been several leadership changes:

  • Dr. Lars Bergstrom stepped down from the Board after four years of service between his roles as Chair and Platinum Member, Google.
  • Eli Gild was appointed by Google to serve as Google’s new representative.
  • Nell Shamrell-Harrington was elected Chair of the Board in January.
  • Ryan Levick was elected Vice Chair in February, following Nell’s transition.
  • Project Director Santiago Pastorino stepped down from the Board in May. His position is currently being filled by other members of the Leadership Council with an official replacement to be chosen soon. 

HR & Administration

This spring brought important staff transitions and role development.

In June, Tina Krauss joined the Foundation as its new Program Manager, filling a vacancy. Bringing an extensive background in event and project management for open source projects, Tina will help scale our current mar-comm programs and develop new community initiatives. 

Paul Lenz, Director of Finance & Funding, announced plans to retire in September. After redefining this leadership role to focus more heavily on grant-making and Project advocacy, we started recruitment in early Q2 and will officially welcome our newest team member in August. 

Finance & Legal

The Foundation continues to strategically invest its operating surplus funds into interest-bearing certificates of deposit.

In Q1, we also submitted applications for continued Alpha-Omega funding to support open source security efforts and are immensely grateful to have been awarded additional funding in Q2. We also began awarding prizes for our AWS-funded crowdsource security contest in Q1. 

With summer underway, we are excited to continue celebrating Rust’s growth, build momentum toward RustConf 2025, and continue the excellent work carried out by our Tech Team (a report on tech progress between August 2024 and 2025 coming later this month!) We remain focused on supporting the Project’s maintainers, deepening our security work, and ensuring the Rust ecosystem remains a place where open collaboration thrives.

If you’re interested in getting involved with the Foundation as a member or supporting RustConf as a sponsor, please get in touch. We look forward to seeing many of you in Seattle this September!

You can find past Rust Foundation Quarterly Updates here.

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Rebecca Rumbul

Dr. Rebecca Rumbul is the Executive Director & CEO of the Rust Foundation. She holds a PhD in Politics and Governance and has worked as a consultant and researcher with governments, parliaments, and development agencies all over the world, advocating for openness and transparency, and developing tools to improve digital participation. In addition to her work at the Rust Foundation, Rebecca is a Non-Executive Director and Council Member for the UK Advertising Standards Authority and a Trustee of the Hansard Society.