Back in the summer (#1010673), @theariard introduced "a natively multi process full node written in rust, wrapping the core's libbitcoinkernel" called bitcoinbackbone. There was an update in October as well (#1251477), and now it looks like Riard has some new updates.

There is a lot that I'm probably missing with this project, but what I'm really interested in is that it is using libbitcoinkernel (#1274173) and that Riard is implementing BIP 324 (encrypted transport).

Check it out if you have some time.