Series → #Vanta In Practice
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Block explorers for privacy chains: a Rust indexer for vanta
Patching btc-rpc-explorer got us to 'works.' Then we wrote vanta-explorer in Rust + React: an Axum backend, SQLite indexer, and a SPA that renders shielded transfers as opaque commitments without lying about what it knows.
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Stratum v1, the from-scratch Python version
Solo mining Vanta requires a Stratum server. Public-pool is fine for normal chains; mandatory privacy pushes the pool toward shielded coinbases, encrypted-note submission, and an L2 retry queue. pool/stratum_server.py does it all in stdlib Python.
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Generating mempool with a Rust txbot
Empty blocks lie. A new chain whose miners are mining empty templates is not exercising any of the code that fails in production. The txbot is a 200-line Rust loop that round-robins coins through 114 addresses to keep mempool honest.
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iroh in production: encrypted-note gossip on a 1-minute-block chain
Why vanta-node uses iroh-gossip for L2 P2P instead of libp2p, what the topic + ALPN setup actually looks like, the GossipMessage shape, and the saturating-decrement bug that taught me an event ordering lesson.
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The vanta sidecar: how a Rust ZK indexer talks to a C++ Bitcoin node
vantad is C++. The ZK index is Rust. They cooperate over RPC and a REST API, with the C++ verifier linked statically through libvanta_verifier.a. Here is the audit-surface trade we made and what the sidecar actually does.
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Cross-compiling vantad for darwin: Apple Silicon, sign + notarise
Shipping vantad as a notarised Mac binary inside a Tauri app meant fixing libconsensus link order, building Rust release with the right target triple, signing every sidecar, and stapling the DMG separately. The notes from the trenches.
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The vanta wallet HTTP API: an Axum bridge to vantad RPC
Before the Tauri desktop wallet there was an Axum web wallet. It is a five-route Rust service that wraps vantad's JSON-RPC and serves a single static page. Boring on purpose — and the boring is the point.
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Latitude bare-metal primary, Fly.io backup: the deploy story for a 1-min-block chain
Vanta v1 went LIVE on a Latitude bare-metal box at 64.34.82.145:9333 with a Fly.io seed fleet as auto-failover. Why a 1-min-block chain hates cold starts, what the fly.toml has to say about it, and the cost math that picks bare metal.
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Vanta Desktop: a Tauri wallet that ships its own full node
Most desktop wallets are thin RPC clients that talk to somebody else's node. The Vanta desktop app spawns vantad and the L2 sidecar as Tauri sidecar binaries, owns their PIDs, and adopts orphans on restart. Here is how that came together.
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Tauri 2.x sidecars in anger: the ergonomics paper-cuts I had to fix
externalBin wants a target-triple suffix nobody documents loudly enough. The dev resolver walks up parents. Startup must be sequenced. The setup-sidecars.sh + resolve_binary() story for shipping a wallet that runs its own node.