Zcash Mempool Visualizer (Proposal for Minor Grants)

Community Grants Minor Grants
1

Hello guys!
I want to present here my proposal for the second round of Minor Grants Program.

Everyone knows about TxStreet a mempool visualizer for various coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, etc… But they don’t support Zcash.

So, I want to create our own mempool visualizer!

Details of this proposal:

  • A Mempool Visualizer for Zcash.
  • The visualizer will be a website, name not defined yet.
  • This website will be written in javascript and a html5 graphics library like PiXI.
  • The front-end website will rely on a zcash full node instance for RPC calls, I’ll probably use Zebra.

This proposal includes:

  • Development of Zcash Mempool Visualizer Website
  • Run a Zebra full node
  • Full support for at least 1 year.

There’s only 1 deliverable:

  • Zcash Mempool Visualizer Website and Zcash full node infrastructure

Time for delivery

Development will take around 4 months, the payment of this grant, if approved, will be done upon completion of deliverable 1.

Hou much I’m asking for:

  • I’m asking for a total of $18,400.00 USD (Eighteen Thousand and four hundred dollars)

Breakdown on the asked amount:

  • Hosting a Zebra full node: $200 * 12 (1 year) = $2,400 (this value should cover the expenses for cloud computing)
  • Hiring an artist for all front-end art creation: $1,200 (For creating the graphics, and updates, new skins, etc…)
  • Developing back-end + front-end website and full support for 1 year: ~$1,233.33 * 12 (1 year) = $14,800 (A typical Brazilian developers salary)

Little more about me

I’m James, Brazilian developer. I’m the author of many projects involving Zcash. The Zcash Global discord server has many of my bots for education and entertainment purposes.
With the help of a previous minor grants, I created Dizzy and Tipsy, Discord and Telegram bots for sending and receiving $ZEC.
I also try yo help the community, I made a very small contribution to Zingo PC wallet.

I hope I can receive this grant to make this awesome Zcash Mempool Visualizer, I think it’s a nice tool to have.

Thanks to everyone and feel free to ask me anything.

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Here is a poorly made mockup of what I have in mind:

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Don’t worry! If approved, I will hire a professional artist to make something better.

TxStreet has a bus animation to symbolize blocks being mined.
My idea is to make something like an JRPG Game (Pokémon for example) of a train station (or maglev train, something high tech).

The transactions will be represented by little Zebras of course.

The visualizer will also display info like current block, mempool transactions, median fees, etc …

But I’m open to other ideas.

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I like it, I would like the information to be viewable elsewhere on the website in traditional bar graphs/line charts too

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I like your mockup, but agree it would also be helpful to be able to view the information in traditional bar graphs/line charts too. For Bitcoin, I’ve always used Johoe’s Bitcoin Mempool Statistics. Maybe something like that?

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It looks cute. With zcash, what kind of representation & information are you thinking of showing? Because at the moment, 99.9% of the mempool are shielded spam transactions. I can’t even find my own transaction in there.

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@zkcroc @aquietinvestor Yes, it’s a nice idea. The website can have a separate tab for bar charts or dedicate space on screen for that.

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My idea is to sort the transactions using zip-401 eviction weight.
Transactions that are less likely to be evicted will be closer to the train, and transactions that are more likely to be evicted will be further away from the train.
Don’t know if this is a perfect solution, but I believe this way we can more or less sort legit transactions.

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I would like to see this slightly evolved to a dashboard that gives you an overall understanding of the health of the Zcash protocol. By this I mean, adding…

  1. Node count, hashrate, and stats.
  2. Lightwalletd up/down status

I can help you with some actual widgets for the chart work :slight_smile:

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I like the idea. While the graphics idea seem fun, I also agree that a regular visualization with charts would be helpful.

For reference there is already Zcash Mempool but it’s very simple.

I’d like to see more info like eviction weight and expiry height (or more useful: how many blocks to expire).

Also being able to plot some of the data to see how it evolves over time would be great.

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yes , we need dat!
it doesnt need to be too much better visually den ur mockup. maybe just bit more polished only.

the more info we have visually about Zcash network de better imo.

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Love it, great idea.

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Thanks for the feedback guys. :heart:
It is a nice idea to also have information displayed as graphs/charts.
I’ll look into that, it shouldn’t be that hard to implement.

Please send me links to nice mempool visualization websites to get inspiration from.
The ones I know:
mempool.space
Blockchain.com

Let’s hope this proposal get accepted, and until then keep the questions and feedback coming.

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:fire: The TxStreet is very cool, I can imagine zcash now thanks to that. Nice idea.

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Hey guys, I appreciate all the feedback on features like bar graphs statistics / node count / hash rate, but to avoid feature creep (just learned this term, don’t know if I’m using properly), this proposal is “only” a visual representation and minor statistics about of the Zcash network mempool.

Since I’m focused more on Zcash success than personal gains, I encourage everyone to also take a look at this proposal: Zcash Metrics and Analytics Dashboard.

No, I’m not “throwing the towel”, I’m just being honest, I would hate to be accepted by the minor grants program and “under deliver”.

See you later. :heart:

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Hey James, thanks for mentioning my proposal. I hope that both of our grants are funded.

Cheers

1 Like