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Crate zebrad

Crate zebrad 

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Zebra logotype

Zebra is a Zcash full node written in Rust. Follow the introductory page in the Zebra Book to learn more.

§About Zcash

Zcash is a cryptocurrency designed to preserve the user’s privacy. Like most cryptocurrencies, it works by a collection of software nodes run by members of the Zcash community or any other interested parties. The nodes talk to each other in peer-to-peer fashion in order to maintain the state of the Zcash blockchain. They also communicate with miners who create new blocks. When a Zcash user sends Zcash, their wallet broadcasts transactions to these nodes which will eventually reach miners, and the mined transaction will then go through Zcash nodes until they reach the recipient’s wallet which will report the received Zcash to the recipient.

§Alternative Implementations

The first Zcash node, zcashd, was originally created as a fork of Bitcoin Core and is no longer maintained. Zebra is an independent Zcash node implementation, written from scratch, and is the actively maintained node for the network. Other implementations built on or alongside Zebra also exist. Because they implement the same protocol, conforming nodes interoperate and maintain the Zcash network together.

§Zebra Advantages

These are some of the advantages or benefits of Zebra:

  • Performance: Zebra is built from scratch in an async, parallelized design, giving it high throughput for block validation and syncing.
  • Security: Zebra is written in Rust, a memory-safe language, which reduces the risk of memory-safety and correctness bugs that could compromise the node or the environment it runs in.
  • Modularity: Zebra is organized as a set of reusable crates (zebra-chain, zebra-consensus, zebra-network, zebra-state, zebra-rpc, and more). Wallets, indexers, and other tools can build on these directly instead of reimplementing core Zcash logic.
  • Broader deployment targets: Its modular design makes it possible to run Zcash consensus code in a wider range of environments, including mobile and WebAssembly.
  • Open contribution: A modern, well-documented Rust codebase lowers the barrier for new contributors, widening the pool of developers who can review, maintain, and extend the Zcash protocol.
  • Ecosystem foundation: Because Zebra is independent and openly developed, other teams can build implementations, forks, and services on top of it, supporting a healthy and decentralized network.

§Configuration

The command below places the generated zebrad.toml config file in the default preferences directory of Linux:

zebrad generate -o ~/.config/zebrad.toml

See config::ZebradConfig for other OSes default locations or more information about how to configure Zebra.

§Zebra Feature Flags

The following Cargo features are available at compile time:

§Metrics

  • configuring a tracing.progress_bar: shows key metrics in the terminal using progress bars, and automatically configures Zebra to send logs to a file. (The progress-bar feature is activated by default.)
  • prometheus: export metrics to prometheus.

Read the metrics section of the book for more details.

§Tracing

Sending traces to different subscribers:

  • configuring a tracing.log_file: appends traces to a file on disk.
  • journald: send tracing spans and events to systemd-journald.
  • sentry: send crash and panic events to sentry.io.
  • flamegraph: generate a flamegraph of tracing spans.

Changing the traces that are collected:

  • filter-reload: dynamically reload tracing filters at runtime.
  • error-debug: enable extra debugging in release builds.
  • tokio-console: enable tokio’s console-subscriber (needs specific compiler flags)
  • A set of features that skip verbose tracing. The default features ignore debug and trace logs in release builds.

Read the tracing section of the book for more details.

§Testing

  • proptest-impl: enable randomised test data generation.
  • lightwalletd-grpc-tests: enable Zebra JSON-RPC tests that query lightwalletd using gRPC.

§Experimental

  • elasticsearch: save block data into elasticsearch database. Read the elasticsearch section of the book for more details.
  • internal-miner: enable experimental support for mining inside Zebra, without an external mining pool. This feature is only supported on testnet. Use a GPU or ASIC on mainnet for efficient mining.

§Zebra crates

The Zebra monorepo is a collection of the following crates:

The links in the list above point to the documentation of the public APIs of the crates. For the documentation of the internal APIs, follow https://zebra.zfnd.org/internal that lists all Zebra crates as well in the left sidebar.

Modules§

application
Zebrad Abscissa Application
commands
Zebrad Subcommands
components
Holds components of a Zebra node.
config
Zebrad Config
prelude
Application-local prelude: conveniently import types/functions/macros which are generally useful and should be available everywhere.

Type Aliases§

BoxError
Error type alias to make working with tower traits easier.