Where Are All the Zcash Nodes? Exploring a Simple, Clear View of the Network

[EmilioNM]

Hey folks,

I have something on my mind and I want to ask you, in case there is some project I do not know about. From what I see, Zcash does not really have a Bitnodes-style page where we can easily see how many nodes are active, how many are reachable, etc.

I have seen some alternatives, but the numbers look a bit strange: some also count Flux nodes, others look out of date, and in other cases developers or community members share this information manually from time to time. For me, it feels like we are missing one simple and reliable place to see the basic health of the network.

I was thinking that maybe we can build something like this using as a reference the Ziggurat network crawler that Equilibrium made for Zcash. As I remember, a lot of that work was focused on testnet and not on a long-running mainnet service.

My question is also to avoid doing duplicate work: is there already someone working on something similar? I found some things that we could maybe use as a base, but I did not see any active project or team doing this in a clear way.

I think this kind of tool is important, because it can help with security and, especially, with the decentralization of the network

[EmilioNM]

If you know this and you have the time to answer i going to a appreciate your support @shieldedmark

[conradoplg]

This is a great idea and I’m not aware of anyone working on it.

[nullcopy]

I would also find this useful and I’d be happy to help build it

[shieldedmark]

Nobody is working on it right now but back when I as at Equilibrium Labs with @olliten and @JoakimEQ we built a crawler and visualizer at Ziggurat · GitHub.

I thought it had bitrotted but then I learned that @dismad runs it every week for the newsletter.

[dismad]

Yes, we have been collecting node data since NU6 deployed. We ziggurat.

total node count.

zebrad/zcashd counts.

@EmilioNM feel free to use this data if it helps you, its all open source

[EmilioNM]

Thanks so much @dismad. I’m studying it because I think that probably it is a good tool to have something like Bitnode. Thanks for the information and thank you so much for the feedback. I’m going to analyze it better to know all the parts that we need to make this project, because I think that it is something that we need to view the health of Zcash. We already have the base thanks to the Equilibrium team

[EmilioNM]

Hey @dismad,I was analyzing everything, and you shared some interesting data, but I have one technical question a quick question: Did you have to make significant modifications/patches to the original Ziggurat crawler to get these metrics, or does the old repo still run somewhat smoothly out of the box on the current network?

[sudo-julien]

@nullcopy

help build it

also me too this is somenthing that all the people that wants to see the health of zcash is going to use

[dismad]

@EmilioNM

Did you have to make significant modifications/patches to the original Ziggurat crawler to get these metrics, or does the old repo still run somewhat smoothly out of the box on the current network?

I think triple added a quick patch in the repo ( check history in github ) but otherwise no, compile and run.

[EmilioNM]

Thank you very much for that information.