We wanted more guarantees around safety. Stellar isn't written in Rust and Rust has some very nice safety properties that we felt were valuable enough for a ful

We wanted more guarantees around safety. Stellar isn't written in Rust and Rust has some very nice safety properties that we felt were valuable enough for a full-on rewrite. We also wanted to be able to hand-tune the performance of the system, and the only way we could really get to that level of control was to do it ourselves. Finally, we wanted to perform consensus on encrypted values so that the nodes wouldn't be able to censor transactions.