Zushi : one-click Zcash regtest dev environment

Zcash Apps
1

Spinning up zcashd regtest nodes was eating our testing time, so I built zushi , it’s nigiri but for Zcash.

zushi start → zcashd in Docker, 101 blocks pre-mined, wallet funded, block explorer up.

Repo: GitHub - yash25198/zushi · GitHub

What’s in the box

Faucet : zushi faucet <addr> [amt] for transparent funds, --shielded for Orchard/Sapling. Uses z_sendmany with NoPrivacy policy and handles coinbase selection so you don’t have to.

Block explorer at localhost:5001 : full shielded tx support: Sapling/Orchard spends (nullifiers), Sapling/Orchard outputs (commitments) and tx-type badges (coinbase / transparent / shielding / unshielding / shielded).

Auto mining : zushi mine runs at mainnet cadence (1 block every 75s) or any interval you set for testing time-dependent flows .

Shield helper : zushi shield wraps z_shieldcoinbase.

Opt-in lightwalletd : zushi start --lightwalletd exposes gRPC on :9067 for testing wallet integrations.

Raw RPC passthrough : zushi rpc <anything> goes straight to zcash-cli.

Got a few ideas for where to take this next (reorgs, snapshots) but would love feedback from folks building wallets, protocol tooling, or cross-chain infra on what’s missing.

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3

Hello!

That’s a really sharp piece of tooling. By wrapping zcashd into a Dockerized regtest environment with pre‑mined blocks, faucet, block explorer, auto‑mining, and lightwalletd support, you’ve essentially given Zcash developers the same convenience Bitcoin devs get from Nigiri. The faucet and shield helper are especially useful since coinbase handling and shielded transactions can be a pain to script manually.

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