Zcash Foundation Adds Five DNS Seeders After ECC’s Go Offline
New Zcash nodes couldn't bootstrap properly - they'd just timeout trying to connect to the offline seeders.
Quick overview
- ECC's DNS seeders stopped responding on January 8, causing new Zcash nodes to struggle with onboarding.
- The Zcash Foundation deployed five new DNS seeders across multiple regions, increasing their total to six and improving peer discovery.
- This move enhances network reliability and performance, allowing users to connect to seeders closer to their geographic location.
- The January 8 outage highlighted infrastructure weaknesses, prompting ZF to improve decentralization and reduce reliance on ECC.
ECC’s DNS seeders stopped responding January 8. New Zcash nodes couldn’t bootstrap properly – they’d just timeout trying to connect to the offline seeders. Network kept running fine but onboarding slowed to a crawl.
Zcash Foundation responded by deploying five new DNS seeders across multiple regions. Combined with their existing Iowa seeder, that brings ZF’s total to six. All live now, helping nodes discover peers and connect to the network.
DNS seeders solve the classic peer-to-peer discovery problem. When you’re just starting a node, how do you know who the other peers are? Seeders maintain lists of reliable nodes and serve those addresses to anyone asking. Without working seeders, new nodes have no easy way to join the network.
Geographic distribution matters for two reasons. First, reliability – if one seeder goes down, others still work. Second, performance – European users can now hit seeders physically closer to them instead of routing all requests to US servers. Faster startup times for wallets and nodes.
ZF’s earlier seeder work used CoreDNS written in Go. Memory safe, cloud-friendly, scalable enough for public cloud providers to use in Kubernetes deployments. Way better than the old Bitcoin-inherited code ECC was running.
Before this, Zcash had only two DNS seeders. One operated by ECC directly, another run personally by str4d who works for ECC. Both using legacy Bitcoin code. That’s not real decentralization when both seeders trace back to the same organization and the same codebase.
ZF taking this over removes one of Zcash’s last sole dependencies on ECC. Their seeders are already integrated into Zebra and headed for zcashd. Once that PR merges, every full Zcash node can join the network even if ECC gets attacked or just decides to stop running infrastructure. Actual decentralization.
Shielded Labs is deploying additional seeders too. ZF put out a Docker image with instructions for anyone wanting to run their own. Getting into the main client implementations requires meeting policy requirements but they’re not onerous.
The January 8 outage exposed infrastructure weakness. When critical network functions depend on a single org, one failure breaks things. ZF saw the gap and moved to fix it. Now there’s redundancy across independent operators in different geographic regions.
ZF’s also considering more deployments in other regions. Asia-Pacific would make sense for latency reasons. Maybe South America. More coverage means better reliability and faster peer discovery globally.
Price popped 12% to around $437 after the news but that’s probably more about the SEC closing its enforcement review. SEC sent ZF a subpoena August 31, 2023 related to digital asset offerings. They just announced no enforcement action planned. That clears regulatory overhang that’s been weighing on the project.
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