Zebra version vs MagicBean version

General Education
1

I’m trying to determine how many nodes are running the latest zebra 2.3.0.

When I view the node list at Blockchair node explorer it displays a list of running node versions expressed as MagicBean:x.x.x.

What is the “MagicBean” equivalent version of zebra 2.3.0? Why is MagicBean displayed instead of the released version eg. 2.3.0?

Thanks

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2

ZecHub uses this tool to scan for nodes. H/T to @Autotunafish for this fix, make sure to update before compiling.

Running for a few hours yields this, which I narrowed down with grep:

  "/Zebra:2.3.0/": 6,
  "/MagicBean:6.0.0/": 3,
  "/MagicBean:6.2.0(bitcore)/": 1,
  "/Zebra:2.2.0/": 13,
  "/Zebra:2.1.1/": 1,
  "/MagicBean:6.2.0/": 71,

This is just a snap shot of public nodes this crawler sees, more probably exists!

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3

MagicBean is the name used for zcashd nodes built from the GitHub - zcash/zcash: Zcash - Internet Money repository maintained by ECC. They are not Zebra nodes.

4

Also note that the 2k+ MagicBean 7.2.0 nodes are from a fork of Zcash whose name I always forget

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5

I’m using the dnsseed tool

If I do a grep -v "/MagicBean:7.2.0" dnsseed.dump | wc -l to exclude all the invalid nodes, the final number comes out to 73 legit zcash nodes. Granted I’ve only been scanning for about an hour but still, only 73 legit nodes?

Is that an accurate ballpark for the number of active ZCash nodes?

You specifically mentioned the MagicBean:7.2.0 nodes as being invalid. I assume the other MagicBean versions are legit Zcash nodes?

Thanks

1 Like
6

That sounds about right, there really aren’t many active nodes unfortunately.

All the 7.x ones should be from the fork (i.e. not Zcash)

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7

Seems about right.

Screenshot_2025-06-13_15-48-45
Screenshot_2025-06-13_15-48-451997×849 47.3 KB

We run every week and graph here.

Here is the JSON data.

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8

In that case, let’s hope BlockChair doesn’t update their code to reflect the actual number of nodes.:wink:

This is embarrassing. I had no idea the situation was so dire.

9

Very nice! Does your count include IPv6 nodes? I’m showing a total of 11 out of 71 nodes with IPv6 support.

Percentage wise, that’s about 15% of nodes running IPv6 currently.

I’m curious to see if we see any meaningful increase in IPv6 support now that IPv6 support has been enabled by default in Zebra.

Although, I suppose we won’t see much considering the majority of the nodes don’t appear to upgrade all that often based on the number of “MagicBean” version strings compared to “Zebra” strings.