Zebra is the Zcash Foundation's independent, consensus-compatible implementation of a Zcash node, currently under development. It can be used to join the Zcash peer-to-peer network, which helps keeping Zcash working by validating and broadcasting transactions, and maintaining the Zcash blockchain state in a distributed manner.
Zcash is a cryptocurrency designed to preserve the user's privacy. If you just want to send and receive Zcash then you don't need to use Zebra directly. You can download a Zcash wallet application which will handle that for you.
Please join us on Discord if you'd like to find out more or get involved!
You would want to run Zebra if you want to contribute to the Zcash network: the more nodes are run, the more reliable the network will be in terms of speed and resistance to denial of service attacks, for example.
Zebra aims to be faster, more secure, and more easily extensible than other Zcash implementations.
Every few weeks, we release a new Zebra beta release.
Zebra's network stack is interoperable with zcashd
,
and Zebra implements all the features required to reach Zcash network consensus.
Currently, Zebra validates all of the Zcash consensus rules for the NU5 network upgrade.
But it may not validate any:
Building zebrad
requires Rust,
libclang, and a C++ compiler.
zebrad
is still under development, so there is no supported packaging or
install mechanism. To run zebrad
, follow the instructions to compile zebrad
for your platform:
cargo
and rustc
.
stable
Rust version.
Earlier versions are not supported or tested, but they might work.
(Rust 1.57 and earlier are not supported, due to missing features.)libclang
, libclang-dev
, llvm
, or llvm-dev
packages, depending on your package managerg++
, Xcode
, or MSVC
cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra --tag v1.0.0-beta.13 zebrad
zebrad start
(see Running Zebra for more information)For more detailed instructions, refer to the documentation.
For performance reasons, some debugging and monitoring features are disabled in release builds.
You can enable these features using:
cargo install --features=<name> ...
The recommended requirements for compiling and running zebrad
are:
We continuously test that our builds and tests pass on:
The latest GitHub Runners for:
Docker:
Zebra's tests can take over an hour, depending on your machine. We're working on making them faster.
zebrad
might build and run fine on smaller and slower systems - we haven't
tested its exact limits yet.
For more detailed requirements, refer to the documentation.
If Zebra's build runs out of RAM, try setting:
export CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=2
If Zebra's tests timeout or run out of RAM, try running:
cargo test -- --test-threads=2
(cargo uses all the processor cores on your machine by default.)
Some of Zebra's tests deliberately cause errors that make Zebra panic. macOS records these panics as crash reports.
If you are seeing "Crash Reporter" dialogs during Zebra tests, you can disable them using this Terminal.app command:
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none
By default, Zebra uses the following inbound TCP listener ports:
Zebra needs some peers which have a round-trip latency of 2 seconds or less. If this is a problem for you, please open a ticket.
zebrad
's typical mainnet network usage is:
Zebra also performs an initial sync every time its internal database version changes.
For more detailed information, refer to the documentation.
Some of Zebra's tests download Zcash blocks, so they might be unreliable depending on your network connection.
You can set ZEBRA_SKIP_NETWORK_TESTS=1
to skip the network tests.
Zebra may be unreliable on Testnet, and under less-than-perfect network conditions. See our roadmap for details.
Zebra uses up to 40 GB of space for cached mainnet data, and 10 GB of space for cached testnet data.
RocksDB cleans up outdated data periodically, and when the database is closed and re-opened.
Zebra's state commits changes using RocksDB database transactions.
If you forcibly terminate Zebra, or it panics, any incomplete changes will be rolled back the next time it starts.
So Zebra's state should always be valid, unless your OS or disk hardware is corrupting data.
There are a few bugs in Zebra that we're still working on fixing:
We are working on improving Zebra performance, the following are known issues:
RPCs might also be slower than they used to be, we need to check:
Ongoing investigations:
Features:
Performance and Reliability:
Currently, the following features are out of scope:
The Zebra website contains user documentation, such as how to run or configure Zebra, set up metrics integrations, etc., as well as developer documentation, such as design documents. We also render API documentation for the external API of our crates, as well as internal documentation for private APIs.
Zebra has a responsible disclosure policy, which we encourage security researchers to follow.
Zebra is distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0).
See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT.