Flashbake is available on Ghostnet

Flashbake, the framework to send a Tezos transaction directly to a baker, is now available on the Ghostnet testnet.

A Tezos transaction normally travels from you to the baker through the mempool, a broadcast mechanism built into the Tezos peer-to-peer network. But some users may prefer to send a transaction directly to the baker, bypassing the mempool, for privacy reasons or otherwise. Flashbake lets you do this. Read more about Flashbake in the documentation.

Here is how to use it.

You need:

• the tezos-client Octez binary,
• some funds from the Ghostnet faucet.

Let’s assume two funded accounts, alice and bob.

To monitor the mempool, let’s use TzFlow. Open the Ghostnet instance of TzFlow in a new browser window.

Regular transaction

Let’s perform a regular transfer:

tezos-client --endpoint https://ghostnet.smartpy.io transfer 1 from alice to bob

It may take up to 30 seconds for the transaction to go through. Predictably, you can see it on TzFlow.

Flashbake transaction

Let’s now perform a transfer using Flashbake:

tezos-client --endpoint https://ghostnet.relay.flashbake.xyz transfer 2 from alice to bob

You can see that the transaction takes longer to complete than the previous one. This is because not every baker on Ghostnet is a Flashbaker. In order for a baker to be Flashbake-capable, they need to install the Flashbake endpoint and register to the on-chain Flashbake registry.

Sure enough, after one minute or two, the transaction is included in a block. It does not appear on TzFlow: the transaction bypassed the mempool!

Next steps

Please try it out, report bugs and let us know what you think in the #flashbake channel on the Tezos-dev slack.

If you are a Ghostnet baker, feel free to become a Flashbaker. The Flashbake Relay is also open-source and anyone can run their own, so feel free to try.

We will launch on Mainnet next. Stay tuned!

⚡🍞 team.