At Zcash Basis, our mission is to construct and assist infrastructure that ensures Zcash stays a safe, non-public, and decentralized monetary system. As at all times, our focus stays unwavering: we’re right here to ship code that retains Zcash operating.
Right this moment, we’re proud to announce a major addition to the Zcash ecosystem: a local Rust implementation of the Zcash DNS Seeder.
Why a New Seeder?
DNS seeders are a vital piece of “plumbing” for any decentralized community. When a brand new Zcash node begins for the primary time, it has no concept the place to seek out friends. The seeder offers an preliminary record of energetic, wholesome nodes, permitting the brand new participant to affix the community.
Traditionally, the ecosystem has relied on legacy implementations. By rewriting this device in Rust, we obtain a number of key targets:
- Native Integration with Zebra: The brand new seeder leverages the
zebra-networkcrate—the identical battle-tested networking stack that powers our Zebra full node. This ensures that the seeder crawls the community utilizing the very same logic and protocol requirements as the remainder of our infrastructure. - Reminiscence Security and Efficiency: The seeder makes use of a contemporary, lock-free structure to serve DNS queries with minimal latency, even underneath excessive load.
- Constructed-in Resilience: The seeder contains per-IP price limiting to guard in opposition to DNS amplification assaults, making certain that our infrastructure can’t be weaponized in opposition to others.
Transport Whereas it Issues
We consider that one of the best ways to assist Zcash is to shore up its weak spots. Peer discovery is commonly neglected till it fails; by offering a contemporary, high-performance various, we’re making certain the Zcash community stays strong and accessible to everybody.
Options at a Look
The brand new seeder is prepared for manufacturing testing and contains a number of options designed for contemporary operators:
- Lively Community Crawler: Makes use of
zebra-networkfor dependable peer discovery and administration. - Authoritative DNS Server: Serves A and AAAA information utilizing the
hickory-dnsframework. - Observability: Contains built-in Prometheus metrics for real-time monitoring of peer well being and question quantity.
- Docker-Prepared: Ships with full Docker and docker-compose assist for speedy, safe deployment.
Trying Forward
We invite the Zcash group and node operators to assessment the code and start testing the brand new seeder on each Mainnet and Testnet. Yow will discover the supply code, documentation, and deployment guides in our GitHub repository. Please report any points on the Github repository.
We stay dedicated to delivering the high-quality, open-source infrastructure that the Zcash group deserves. There’s way more work to be completed, and we’re getting after it.
