ZNodes Explorer - Real Time Network Map For Zebra & Zcashd

[SafeguardLabs]

Hellooo I’ve been developing a platform where you can see all the Zebra nodes that already exist, including their data and status. I used Ziggurat as the base for this platform, but I’ve been making a lot of changes and filters to improve it.

Right now, the platform can discover and display all the Zebra nodes. I’m updating it because I also want to add support for zcashd nodes. My goal is to create something similar to Bitnodes, but focused on Zcash.

I don’t have a lot of money to build this project, I used my GitHub student credits and my own money to buy the VPS and the domain but I think this is something that the community needs. It also helps me to start learning more about Zcash and the ecosystem.

If you have something like an interesting function I could add, or if you have some suggestions I can solve, please let me know. If you have ideas for next features, you can tell me because this is a platform for all of the Zcash community.

Platform: https://znodes.live/

[jenkin]

Cool, thanks! But only 64 nodes worldwide? And where is the code? Is it open source, or not?

And you can register your handle on zcash.me and add a simple donate link…

[SafeguardLabs]

Helloo well to make sure that the information about the nodes is correct we found this image that @dismad published about the Zcash nodes so we used this to verify the information and you can actually see that our numbers are so close.

We have fewer nodes displayed because we use some filters to make sure that the nodes that you are watching are the “best nodes” so the filters make sure that the nodes are not in the Flux network. Then we add another parameter to make sure that you are not going to see the testnet nodes or late nodes and we dont show you desynchronized nodes and actually another parameter that we add is filtering the unknown agents. That is why we have few nodes but these nodes actually are the best nodes and right now you are seeing only the Zebra nodes but we are going to add the zcashd nodes in these weeks.

And thankiu so much for the information about the donations links I am going to check that and about the code I am going to publish the code in this week because this is going to be open source but I want to make a solid product and add the zcashd nodes first.

[shieldedmark]

Cool, looks good! Please feel free to make upstream PRs to Ziggurat · GitHub.

It’s really cool to see the work we did at Equilibrium Labs still being used.

[SafeguardLabs]

Hello yes i am going to start making PRs and thakiu so much for your comments

[SafeguardLabs]

Hello, this is an update for this thread. In this month we are going to add the zcashd nodes. We are actually making this because zcashd nodes need more filters and give more information, so I am making like a investigation to make sure that all is correct.

[shieldedmark]

Awesome!

@SafeguardLabs As of zebrad 3.1.0, the filters should be similar between the two implementations. Are you seeing something different?

[SafeguardLabs]

Hello, thanks for the observation. We are checking that, but I can confirm the crawler supports zebrad 3.1.0 with no problem. We search for Zebra in the user_agent and the handshake works perfectly. I will publish the repo on GitHub this week and tag you so you can see the code.

[shieldedmark]

Oh, OK. I was confused aboht what kind of filters you meant.

[SafeguardLabs]

Hello Zcash community I made a fault and I make a lot of posts, but I am going to use only this to start showing constant progress, okay?

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First, if you want to know more of my history and some questions of me you can visit this post:

Hello ZecHub! Responding to the Video Feedback & ZNodes Q&A - #11 by SafeguardLabs

I am going to start writing in this post because I think that the other post is more emotional and this is more technical and we need more technical things .

Well, to order and show the things that I am making: first I am trying to ask for a grant in ZecHub to pay and continue in the development of this platform because I am using my own resources and I already have my debit card with a negative balance but I continue developing this, that’s why I am asking for a grant to upload more functions and continue developing this.

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Second, I saw the Zcash video and I want to give us more details of my project. I made this table to show you the difference between this and Ziggurat. Probably some things I update because we launched a new version of ZNodes with a map and I made some modifications, but there were little modifications.

Comparison: ZNodes vs. Ziggurat of ZecHub

Feature	ZNodes	Ziggurat ZecHub	Impact
Concurrent Connections	2,500	1,200	2x capacity, faster mapping
Attempts per Cycle	1,000	500	More aggressive discovery
Handshake Timeout	2,000ms	300ms	Captures slow Zebra nodes
Reconnection Interval	60s	300s	Fresher data
DNS Refresh	Every 2min	Only at start	Auto-discovers new seeds
Error Handling	Warn + Continue	Panic + Terminate	24/7 Stability
Flux Filtering	4 Layers	Basic	Eliminates ~2,000 fake nodes
APIs	3 endpoints	1 endpoint	getmetrics, getstats, getnodes
Prioritization	Nodes w/o metadata first	Uniform Random	More efficient mapping

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In this part you can see the future work. These are all the tasks that we need to do to have the better platform of Zcash to observe the health of the network. Okay, we made a map already but we need to make other things with the map because we think that we have like a map that looks good but we know that we can do better things.

Future Work

If we get the funding, here is the plan:

1. Backend Upgrade: Improving the crawler with Ziggurat logic to efficiently detect both Zebra and Zcashd nodes.
2. Trust Score: We will classify nodes with a stability score.
3. UI/UX Design: We will hire an external designer to build a clean, ad-free ‘White & Professional’ interface.
4. Privacy-First Map: Implement a live map that respects 100% privacy (zero doxxing, only general regions).
5. Public API: Launch endpoints for other devs.
6. Security: Bulletproof the platform with security audits to guarantee we keep no logs or IPs, ensuring we cover absolutely every necessary front.

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And now the thing that probably we need is feedback of us, especially the feedback of the ZecHub DAO members. Because we want to ask for a grant, but in the last grant the DAO members rejected the project and we want to know the aspects that made the members reject the project to try to cover those issues and have a more percent to receive that grant to pay the debt and the future bills.

And another thing that we want to know is about “crunch”. This is like a repository I think, but someone in the ZecHub meeting said that “crunch” is a tool that can be used in this project but I don’t find any information on this. I want to know if someone can give a link or a link of a post that is talking about that

[SafeguardLabs]

And thiss is the new desing of the plataform i thing that now looks better

[shieldedmark]

For what it’s worth I do think this product is cool regardless of how we arrived here. I’m not part of any official body directly disbursing funds so I expect they’ll do their own due diligence but yeah I like this explorer

[ZCG]

Thank you for your submission. After consideration from ZCG and sufficient time for the community to provide feedback on the forum, the committee has decided to reject this proposal.

[SafeguardLabs]

Hello @ZCG I have a question about the grant that I tried to ask. Why did you put my proposal with a label that “doesn’t meet the criteria”?

I want to know which types of grants I can’t ask via ZCG or something like that. I want to know because I don’t want to disturb.

I ask this because I see that in the thread that you open to approve and reject and say some comments about why you take that decision, my project doesn’t appear.

[SafeguardLabs]

Thanks a lot for your support! I am going to continue with the development. I want to improve the designs. I think that the design is good, but it can be better. but i thing that this is a tool that we need but i don’t know how can i show this to the community of zcash

[SafeguardLabs]

Hellooo comunity of zcash! Just wanted to let you know that we’ve been up and running for about 8 days straight with zero issues. The map is fixed and completely bug-free so far. We’re going to keep pushing like this Just a quick update to invite you to visit the site and watch the Zcash network and node count grow. Congrats Zcash, let’s keep building

[jenkin]

Today I put online my node and I can see it on the map… cool!

A couple of suggestions:

• filter both table and map
• add columns to the table with location

Nice work, thanks!

[SafeguardLabs]

Heyyyyy @jenkin I have some good news!!! I read your feedback, and I decided to go ahead with it because this is definitely a tool that the community needs. The suggestions from the community have been super valuable, which is why I made sure to implement them. I also want to invite everyone to start sharing what they want to show on this site. (If you’re on Windows, just press Control + Shift + R or refresh the site, and you’ll see the new update )

[SafeguardLabs]

And this is the form that the map show when you apply the zebra filter @jenkin

[jenkin]

When a public repository? There are fixes and enhancements I can code by myself and propose with a PR (ie. horizontal scroll for table on mobile, or when filter is active some markers that should be hidden are visible, but with low opacity).

Also an integration with zcashme could be interesting, node operators could link their nodes to a public identity.