The Zcash Foundation uses decentralized computing and cutting-edge cryptography in the production of Zebra – the Foundation’s independent, consensus-compatible, modern, modular implementation of a Zcash node, currently under development.Â
Zebra, the first Zcash node to be written entirely in Rust, can be used to join the Zcash peer-to-peer network. This helps to strengthen the resilience of the network by validating and broadcasting transactions, and maintaining the Zcash blockchain state in a more distributed manner. Â
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The original Zcash node is named zcashd and is developed by the Electric Coin Company as a fork of the original Bitcoin node. Our implementation, on the other hand, is an independent Zcash node implementation, developed from scratch, using memory-safe Rust language. Since zcashd and zebrad implement the same protocol, they can communicate with each other.Â
Alternative node implementations help developers quickly detect implementation-specific bugs that could cause consensus-related issues. Having multiple node implementations also attracts a broader audience of developers to Zcash, who can start contributing in a language that they are more familiar with. Our implementation of zcashd allows Rust developers to easily start developing on and contributing to Zcash.Â
Better Performance: since it was implemented from scratch in an async, parallelized way, Zebra is currently faster than zcashd.
Better Governance: with a new node deployment, there will be more developers who can implement different features for the Zcash network.
Runtime Safety: with an independent implementation, the detection of consensus bugs can happen quicker, reducing the risk of consensus splits.
Spec Safety: with several node implementations, it is much easier to notice bugs and ambiguity in protocol specification.
Better Security: since it is developed in a memory-safe language (Rust), and is less likely to be affected by memory-safety security bugs that could compromise the environment where it is run.
With Zebra, users and developers have a new avenue to engage with the Zcash ecosystem. Read the documentation in the Zebra repo as it continues to update and new features are added by the Zcash Foundation.Â
Need to reach us? Send us an enquiry and a member of our team will get back to you shortly.
