Visualize Zcash Blockchain Data with Zebra + Elasticsearch + Kibana

The Zcash blockchain history is big and rich—any block explorer application can just call RPC methods from a zcashd node and present the data in the desired way. Data analysis is hard in this context, on the one hand, you can just do what a specific application will allow you to do, or on the other hand if you need different visualization you have to create your own app.

As an alternative, we can export and index all block (header and transaction) data fields into an elasticsearch database and use Kibana as a front end to do some analysis.

The possibilities of data visualization are huge with Kibana and all we need to do to create them is to feed an elasticsearch database with valid JSON block data.

When the elasticsearch feature is enabled, each block is sent from Zebra into elasticsearch; this is in addition to saving the block in the internal rocksdb database. We can then guarantee Zebra’s correct ongoing functionality and storage in the desired external database at the cost of more hard drive storage and a longer synchronization time.

Once the data has been inserted into the database, the Kibana part is easy. It may be able to provide many answers to existential questions our community deserves to know, for example:

• How many Orchard transactions have we had since its introduction? (Adoption)
• How many shielded coinbase transactions have we had since its introduction? (Adoption)
• How many Sprout transactions did we have in the last X period? (Deprecation)
• How many transactions per block have we had on average since the start of the blockchain? (Information)
• Which hours of the day are more transactions executed? (User distribution)
• What is the average size of a block or transaction? (Parameters)
• What is the distribution between Orchard, Sapling, Sprout and transparent transactions? (Information)
• And many, many others.