The Zcash Foundation is pleased to announce that we have recently tagged our first release candidate of Zebra (zebra 1.0.0-rc.0), the alternative Zcash node implementation written in Rust. This is the first time that there has been an alternative zcash node implementation running on mainnet and that we are excited to see some Zebra nodes now appearing on the Blockchair node explorer!
We are very happy to share that Zebra also supports the lightwalletd backend JSON-RPCs, can be used as a lightwalletd backend and is currently an optional backend for ZecwalletLite!
With this release we have solved the last few outstanding bugs and issues that could have affected the security, performance and stability of the Zcash network and are confident that long-lived Zebra nodes can be run on mainnet. As such, we are looking forward to Zebra experiencing more “production use”, and we will be shortly be engaging security auditors to conduct an audit of the Zebra code to ensure that users can be confident in its security and stability.
This release of Zebra can be used to join the Zcash peer-to-peer network, which helps to keep Zcash working by validating and broadcasting transactions, and maintaining the Zcash blockchain state in a distributed manner. Zebra’s network stack is interoperable with zcashd, and Zebra implements all the features required to reach Zcash network consensus. Zebra validates all of the Zcash consensus rules.
So please spin up some instances and let us know what you think!