The Sovright Relay Is Live

Every time a new block is mined, the rest of the network must race against the clock to learn about it, so they can start building the next block on top of it. Until a pool knows about the latest block, every share its miners produce is stale, which is wasted work for everyone. The faster blocks come, the more often that race runs, and the more it costs to lose.

Today, we're introducing the Sovright Relay, a public, low-latency relay network that closes that gap. Whatever their size or budget, mining pools and node operators learn about new Zcash blocks from Relay with the same low latency. This is neutral infrastructure, run independently of any pool or miner, and it's live now.

The Ironwood migration is likely to provide a preview of future load on the Zcash network. As the dashboard currently captures, Zcash block space is not stretched, but migrating user funds from Orchard to Ironwood while maximally preserving user privacy will generate a surge in blockspace demand. We hope that the Sovright Relay will be a resource for the network during this stress test.

Why speed favors the biggest pools

On any proof-of-work blockchain, the miners that learn about new blocks first are more likely to complete the next block and win the next round of rewards. Hearing about a new block first isn't free. It takes physical infrastructure, and in practice, this has structurally favored the largest pools, which are more likely to have confirmed the last block and therefore find out about new blocks before anyone else does.

As a result, smaller and newer pools fall behind because they learn about new blocks late. Their mining performance often has little to do with it. The compounding gap shifts hashrate, market share, and the geographic distribution of the network toward whoever can afford the best private infrastructure.

Centralization shows up in more than one place in Zcash mining. Pool operators have had outsized power over which transactions get included, which is one reason why we built the Sovright Mining Pool for individual operators and small miners. The Sovright Relay addresses a similar pressure at the network layer, where infrastructure spend currently determines who can compete.

How the Sovright Relay works

The Sovright Relay runs a small network of relay nodes across major geographic regions, including Asia, Europe, and the US. Each one sits in front of a zebrad full node, run independently of any mining pool or miner. When a new block enters the Zcash peer-to-peer network, Sovright Relay nodes push it onward to mining pools in tens of milliseconds, using a UDP-based protocol built for minimum latency.

The relays are HMAC-authenticated, so a pool can trust that what it received is exactly what the relay sent, and can act on it immediately, while still verifying the block against Zcash's consensus rules as it always would. Forward-error correction handles ordinary packet loss without round-trip retries, and every relay node is instrumented with metrics that pools can monitor in real time. Pools peer with whichever regional relay sits closest to them, treating the Sovright Relay as a fast-path supplement to standard Zcash peer-to-peer. In other words, the Sovright Relay operates somewhat like a CDN for a content site. But where a CDN moves web content closer to readers, the Sovright Relay moves new blocks closer to miners.

The Sovright Relay also doesn't introduce any new protocol or consensus changes. A pool can add or remove it in minutes and fall back to the existing peer-to-peer network with no disruption. This means there's no upgrade to coordinate, nor anything to unwind, if a pool decides to stop using the Sovright Relay.

The trust model

The Sovright Relay belongs in the same category as a DNS root server or a public IPFS gateway — essential, invisible infrastructure an entire network can depend on without it belonging to any single operator.

Pool operators don't need to trust Sovright with funds, keys, or block content beyond the standard Zcash signature scheme they're already relying on. They're verifying the same data they'd verify anyway, just faster. The Sovright Relay simply forwards blocks faster; it never accesses or changes the contents of those blocks.

One relay run by a single party doesn't fix centralization on its own. The real answer is many public relays, run by more independent operators, so that no one operator controls the fastest path to a block. That's why we are releasing the Sovright Relay as an open-source implementation. It's the same direction Bitcoin is heading: FIBRE (Fast Internet Bitcoin Relay Engine), the original block relay network built by Matt Corallo, is being rebuilt as open infrastructure that anyone can run. We're building to that standard from day one.

Sovereignty is infrastructure

Mining centralization on Zcash has been a slow drift, shaped by which pools could afford better infrastructure over the years. The Sovright Relay targets that drift directly at the network layer, the same way the Sovright Mining Pool addresses it at the pool layer.

This means every pool hears about new blocks with the same latency from the Sovright Relay, regardless of its size. The biggest pools don't lose anything by it. They just no longer have a built-in latency edge over smaller pools and solo miners running their own setup.

Zcash mining will become more competitive once pools can succeed on their own merits, not just based on how much private infrastructure they can afford. The Sovright Relay is designed to decentralize Zcash mining by leveling the playing field for miners.