ZecWallet fastsync to improve initial blockchain sync

3rd Party Applications ZecWallet
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I just added a new feature into ZecWallet’s embedded zcashd that essentially does a PoW-only* sync for blocks during the initial block download. This skips some of the most expensive checks for blocks behind a checkpoint, improving the initial download and sync times by 25% - 33% in my tests. More details

This should hopefully improve the experience of new users who have to download the entire ~25 GB blockchain before starting to use ZecWallet.

You can download the latest ZecWallet and let me know if you have feedback: Releases · ZcashFoundation/zecwallet · GitHub

(If you already have a .zcash directory with a downloaded blockchain, this of course won’t be enabled. You can should have an empty .zcash directory to see how it works)

*It technically does more checks than just PoW-only on a block, but it skips the most expensive Tx verification checks.

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Any chance of an arm64 build ? I’m wondering if fastsync will help this work on Raspberry Pi 3B+

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I had the same thought :smile: I think you should just be able to build this branch GitHub - adityapk00/zcash at fastsync. I’d actually done that and uploaded to Keybase earlier but haven’t had a chance to test yet https://keybase.pub/garethtdavies/zcash-armv8-fastsync/

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Oh, I’m sure this would be awesome on arm64. Are there instructions on how to compile zcashd on arm?

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https://zcash.readthedocs.io/en/latest/rtd_pages/user_guide.html#build

apt-get install g++-aarch64-linux-gnu
HOST=aarch64-linux-gnu ./zcutil/build.sh -j$(nproc)
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@garethtdavies @ChileBob

I built one here: Release Fastsync build of zcashd for ARM64 · adityapk00/zcash · GitHub

Try it out and let me know!

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Quick note, I usually build from this branch:

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