Blockcast Shreds

How it works

1. One feed, three layers. The feed is the union of the shreds Blockcast receives, in three layers: data shreds, and coding shreds at even and at odd positions. Data shreds carry the block; the two coding layers carry erasure codes, from which your node can recover lost shreds without a repair round trip.
2. Delivered through an AMT tunnel. A gateway on your host joins the multicast feed through an AMT tunnel (RFC 7450) to a Blockcast relay and hands every shred to your node's own TVU port, which treats it exactly like a shred from turbine. If the feed stops, your node keeps running on turbine alone.
3. Billed on chain, once metering starts. A subscription in the Channel Registry, a Solana program, is an account you fund. It holds your deposit, your price ceiling per GB, your spend cap per slot and your gateway allowlist, which anyone can read on chain. Close it, and everything left comes back to you.

The Blockcast Shreds RPC Node kit

A signed release that turns a host you own into a non-voting Solana mainnet RPC node fed by Blockcast Shreds: Agave with a Geyser gRPC plugin, the Blockcast Shreds gateway, a host firewall, and metrics for your own Prometheus. You get JSON-RPC on 8899 and a gRPC account stream on 10000 behind your own load balancer.

What you need

Host

16 or more dedicated physical cores at a high sustained clock, 384 GB of RAM or more, and two blank local NVMe disks of more than 1.9 TB each. A shared-core virtual machine falls behind the chain.

Network

A reserved public IPv4 address, 1 Gbit/s or more, and TCP and UDP 8000-8030 open inbound.

System

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on x86-64.

Install

One cloud-init file. The first boot downloads the release once, checks its sha256 and signature, and installs everything; later boots download no software until you upgrade. A fresh node downloads a snapshot and can take hours to catch up.

During the pilot, the release and the relay address come with your onboarding. Public downloads follow the pilot.

Get started

1. Ask for pilot access. You receive the kit and the relay address, and, when delivery by subscription opens, the group address of each layer you take.
2. Install the kit on your host, then run sudo rpc-node smoke until it prints smoke: ready.
3. During the pilot your node needs no subscription. When delivery by subscription opens, connect a wallet in the registry below and subscribe once for each layer you take: the layer's group address, a refundable deposit, your price ceiling per GB, a spend cap per slot, and your node's public address as the gateway allowlist. One transaction does all of it. The allowlist is public on chain.
4. Top up whenever you like with a plain SOL transfer to the subscription's address. To stop, revoke it; after the withdrawal wait, close it, and everything left returns to your wallet.

Prices

Once metering starts, you pay per GB delivered (10⁹ bytes) at the prices set on chain, never above your price ceiling. This page reads the prices live from the registry.

Price per GB

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Hold fee for a channel

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Channels active

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The program enforces your limits: it never bills above your price ceiling, never faster than your spend cap per slot, and never more than your balance. Every charge is a public transaction; the byte counts in it are Blockcast's meter readings.

Each layer will be its own subscription, so a node can take the data layer alone.

Pilot status

Live now

• The Channel Registry program on Solana mainnet, with its prices and limits on chain.
• Reserve, Subscribe, Top up, Raise limits, Revoke, and Close and withdraw, from this page with your own wallet. Subscribe creates an on-chain subscription and holds a refundable deposit; it only records your settings until delivery by subscription starts.
• Channels: the publisher decides which reservations to approve, and sends an approved channel from its next registry poll.
• The Blockcast Shreds RPC Node kit, for pilot partners.

Not switched on yet

• Metering. Billing starts only when metering is switched on; until then nothing is charged, and Close returns a deposit in full, less network fees.
• Delivery by subscription. There is no relay filter yet: during the pilot, the feed is delivered by arrangement with each partner. Next, the relay will deliver it only to gateways on a funded subscription's allowlist.
• Shred layers as registry groups. There are no per-layer IPv6 groups yet; their group addresses go to pilot partners when delivery by subscription opens. Until then, a subscription only records your deposit, limits and allowlist on chain, where anyone can read them; it delivers nothing and is not billed.