Name: Matias Urbieta Role: Background: Experience on Blockchain maintenance Responsibilities: Monitor and update the mainnet and testnet blockexplorer.
Zcash community actively works on providing the technology for a blockchain focused on privacy. These privacy properties are not present in other blockchains making Zcash unique on its kind, therefore both developers and end-users may need a different learning path to familiarize themselves with the concept of a privacy preserving blockchain and cryptocurrency protocol.
Testnet plays a fundamental role in the development cycle of a blockchain ecosystem. And most importantly during the first steps of any end-user and developer with intentions of joining the community.
This grant focuses on supporting the blockexplorer for testnet and mainnet from beginning May/25 to end of April/25 .
This grant brings continuity to the previous grant that introduces the support to the blockexplorer and the migration from zcashd to zebra server.
Project Description
For this grant I propose to work on providing a minimum infrastructure to let a Zcash adopter to test the blockchain.
For such a thing, I will maintain a Kubernete project based/inspired on Testnet in a Box (TNB) [tnb] project to use the latest Zcash node (Zebra) and Block Explorer [be] version. Then I’ll deploy it in the cloud with public access.
The grant includes the expenses for hosting all the resources mentioned above.
Host and maintain blockexplorer for testnet and mainnet
Solution Format
Devops service
Dependencies
The project has many critical dependencies: Zebra, Zcashd, NightHawk block explorer and faucet. Any issue in any of these projects will affect the service quality. To mitigate any risk, I’ll be in touch with the Zcash community and contributors to collaboratively resolve issues.
Technical Approach
The solution requires:
Zcashd until Nighthawk’s migration to Zebra is done
Nighthawk
Upstream Merge Opportunities
Hardware/Software Costs (USD)
1000
Hardware/Software Justification
Monthly cost of dedicated AWS cloud server (or similar) per instance:
Amazon Elastic Block Store for 500GB: usd 40.00
Amazon EC2 On-Demand instances for t3a.xlarge 4vCpu 16GB RAM: 109.79
Total: usd 149.79
or VPS server on Europe (ZEC payments available):
6 Xeon CPU cores, 16GB Dedicated ECC RAM and 600GB SSDOnly storage
Once server will host both blockchain testnet and mainnet.
Service Costs (USD)
0
Service Costs Justification
N/A
Compensation Costs (USD)
7400
Compensation Costs Justification
This cost corresponds to professional service to monitor, update software and support the blockexplorer.
Moreover, It includes the support from any issue reported by the community
Total Budget (USD)
8400
Previous Funding
Yes
Previous Funding Details
This is an extension of the previous grant. There are few deliverables related to the Zebra migration. I’ve reached out the @zcg to decide the next steps.
Previous grant:
Other Funding Sources
No
Other Funding Sources Details
No response
Implementation Risks
Based on the last year of experience on supporting the blockexplorer , I don’t see any major risk/obstacle.
Potential Side Effects
I don’t see any negative impact.
Success Metrics
Number of outages and block explorer availability
Startup Funding (USD)
2100
Startup Funding Justification
Payment for the first three months of hosting and service. This corresponds to the Q1 Hosting and support for May, June and July months.
Milestone Details
Milestone: 1 Amount (USD): 0 Expected Completion Date: Startup funding. Description: - Hosting and support for May, June and July months. Acceptance Criteria: BlockExplorer for mainnet and testnet available
Milestone: 2 Amount (USD): 2100 Expected Completion Date: August-2025 Description: - Hosting and support for August, September and October months. Acceptance Criteria: BlockExplorer for mainnet and testnet available
Milestone: 3 Amount (USD): 2100 Expected Completion Date: November-2025 Description: - Hosting and support for November, December and January months. Acceptance Criteria: BlockExplorer for mainnet and testnet available
Milestone: 4 Amount (USD): 2100 Expected Completion Date: February-2026 Description: - Hosting and support for February, March and April months. Acceptance Criteria: BlockExplorer for mainnet and testnet available
Are you open to using the modern zcash-stack Helm chart instead of testnet-in-a-box? We maintain it actively, the more we can all use the same underlying charts the less time that community will be paying for to reinvent wheels, thanks.
I strongly prefer off-Amazon hosting, “the VPS server on Europe” option sounds more decentralized.
@Cacho at the most recent meeting, ZCG voted to approve this proposal. Congratulations!
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And in the interest of raising awareness, there are many issues with the code. If someone experienced with Elixir or confident learning is looking for an easy grant, maintaining the block explorer is probably it:
I’ll look again later after some time for reindexing but the blockheight on both zcashexplorer and zecrocks explorers is different from my testnet node.
We have time to run the code but not to maintain it, a shame that the block explorer has so many problems today.
Maintaining/improving the Zcash support in Blockbook could be a more effective allocation of resources since it is used in production and has active contributors. Or giving Trezor a grant to pay more attention to it, especially in preparation for token balances / ZSAs coming up. Blockbook already supports this on ETH and others.
The first one seems to work, but when you query a transaction with the TXID what it does is download a file instead of displaying the information from the web.
I want to share that the blockexplorer is being indexed thru proxies making it difficult to prevent the indexing.
At the moment, I’ve increased the number of instances (4cores+8cores) which improved the latency during the indexing period. Moreover I’m actively monitoring the instances.
I’ll keep you up to date about the status.
BTW if anyone want to receive alerts, I can share the telegram group by DM.