Hi folks, my name is Safeguards.
I am posting this because I am submitting a grant request for $9,850 to continue the development of ZNodes.live, a tool I have been building to help the Zcash network.
We are approaching a big transition from zcashd to Zebra, and I realized we don’t really have a clear view of our network topology. We are basically flying blind compared to other chains like Bitcoin that have tools like Bitnodes. So I decided to start building one myself.
You can check the working prototype here: https://znodes.live
I used Ziggurat as the base for this platform, but I have been making a lot of changes to the code to make it useful for us. Right now, the platform can discover and display the Zebra nodes.
Why are my numbers different? If you look at the data, you might see fewer nodes than other explorers. This is intentional. I recently compared my data with the scans from @dismad and the raw numbers are very close, but I apply several filters to make sure I am only showing the “best nodes” that actually support the network health.
My crawler currently filters out:
- Nodes that are likely Flux instances (not fully dedicated).
- Testnet nodes or late nodes.
- Desynchronized nodes.
- Unknown user agents.
This way, you are seeing the real, active Zebra nodes.
Why I need this grant ($9,850) I don’t have a lot of money to build this project. Until now, I have used my GitHub student credits and my own money to buy the VPS and the domains because I think this is something the community needs. It also helps me to start learning more about Zcash and the ecosystem.
However, the student credits are running out and the infrastructure needs to be upgraded to handle the heavy load of a network crawler. This grant will be used to:
- Pay for a high-performance VPS (Bare Metal) for the next year.
- Finish the development to add zcashd nodes (right now I only show Zebra).
- Polish the interface for investors and developers.
I plan to open source the code in the coming weeks. I want to make a solid product and finish the zcashd implementation first so the code is clean for everyone to use.
If you have any interesting functions I could add, or if you have some suggestions on how to improve the filters, please let me know. I am building this for the community and I want to hear your feedback.
and I don’t know why. I want to know because this is going to help me to change the proposal. I asked for some feedback in Discord but no one said anything 
and I want to know if the proposal is too expensive or something like that.
