Series → #Vanta In Practice
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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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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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Mining VANTA with a Bitaxe BM1368
A 350 GH/s, ~12 W open-hardware ASIC plugged into a Stratum server I wrote against my own L1. Solo mining isn't economic on Bitcoin in 2026. On a 1-minute-block fork with 100k subsidy, the math changes.
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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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btc-tunnel.sh: SSH-jumping into a remote bitcoind for swap testing
Three small bash scripts wire the desktop dev environment to a real mainnet bitcoind for atomic-swap testing. Tunneling, RPC wrapping, and an address watcher with auto-reconnect — and why exposing 8332 to the internet is a worse idea than you think.
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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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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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L1 nullifier sets: enforcing no-double-spend at consensus
Most privacy chains track spent notes in a wallet-side index and pray. Vanta puts the nullifier set in chainstate and lets the consensus rules do the praying. Here's why that line moved, and what it costs.
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What's in vanta/papers — reading 17 design docs in 2026
Vanta ships its whitepaper as 17 markdown files in the repo, not a PDF on a marketing page. This is the tour: what each doc covers, which one has the wording bug, and why the docs live next to the code.
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Private atomic swaps and the price-discovery problem
BTC ↔ VANTA atomic swaps via HTLC are the easy part. If the VANTA leg is shielded, no observer can compute the rate, and no rate means no public price. Walking through six designs and the hybrid recommendation in vanta/planning.