Following the Sovright Mining Pool testnet, our next release targets a different part of the same centralization problem, but at the network layer.
Introducing the Sovright Relay: a public, low-latency block relay network for Zcash, live now at relay.sovright.com.
The challenge
On any proof-of-work blockchain, the miners that learn about new blocks first are more likely to complete the next block and win the next round of rewards. Currently on Zcash, the speed needed to hear about a block first doesn’t come cheaply. It takes investment in physical infrastructure, and in practice, this has structurally favored the largest pools.
As a result, smaller and newer pools fall behind because they learn about new blocks late. Their mining performance often has little to do with it. The compounding gap shifts hashrate, market share, and the geographic distribution of the network toward whoever can afford the best private infrastructure.
Passage of the active proposal to shorten Zcash’s block time would further widen this gap. Until a pool knows about the latest block, every share its miners produce is stale, which is wasted work for everyone. This means the faster blocks come, the more often that race runs, and the more it costs to lose.
How the Sovright Relay works
The Sovright Relay runs a small network of relay nodes across major geographic regions, including Asia, Europe, and the US. Each one sits in front of a zebrad full node, run independently of any mining pool or miner. When a new block enters the Zcash peer-to-peer network, Sovright Relay nodes push it onward to mining pools in tens of milliseconds, using a UDP-based protocol built for minimum latency. This works somewhat like a CDN, but where a CDN moves web content closer to readers, the Sovright Relay moves new blocks closer to miners.
Equal latency for every pool
Every pool hears about new blocks with the same low latency, regardless of its size or budget. The biggest pools keep every advantage they earned by mining well and lose only the head start that came from spending on private infrastructure. This levels the playing field by ensuring fair competition based on each pool’s mining performance.
No new trust required
The relays are HMAC-authenticated, so a pool can trust that what it received is exactly what the relay sent, and can act on it immediately while still verifying the block against Zcash’s consensus rules as it normally would. The Relay only forwards blocks faster, without ever accessing or changing their contents. It also introduces no new protocol or consensus changes, so a pool can add or remove it in minutes and fall back to standard peer-to-peer with no disruption. There is no upgrade to coordinate, and nothing to unwind if a pool decides to stop using the Sovright Relay.
Open source
One relay run by a single party doesn’t fix centralization on its own. The goal is to have many public relays run by independent operators, so no one controls the fastest path to a block. That is why we are releasing the Sovright Relay as an open-source implementation, following the direction Bitcoin is taking with FIBRE (Fast Internet Bitcoin Relay Engine), the original block relay network built by Matt Corallo.
Sovereignty is infrastructure
The Sovright Relay is live now at relay.sovright.com. Connect to the nearest regional relay, monitor node performance on the live dashboard, and explore the open-source implementation. Your feedback will help shape where the Relay goes next.
More to come.
