Overview
A Shinzo Host is a service that turns indexed blockchain data into Views that applications can query over GraphQL. It receives signed data from one or more Indexers over a peer-to-peer network, verifies it, runs WebAssembly transforms over it, and stores the results in a local DefraDB instance.
A Host is not an Indexer. It does not talk to a source-chain execution client and does not pull blocks from Geth, Reth, or the equivalent node on other supported chains. Instead, the Host consumes primitive documents that Indexers have already produced and signed (blocks, transactions, logs, and chain-specific extras like EIP-2930 access list entries on Ethereum). The Host then verifies those documents, runs the transformations defined by registered Views, and makes the results available to applications.
Purpose and role in the stack
A Host does two things.
Transformations
Developers register Views on ShinzoHub, where each View defines how primitive data should be filtered, decoded, and reshaped. A View might ABI-decode ERC-20 Transfer logs from Ethereum into a USDCTransfer collection, or decode equivalent token events on another supported chain. The Host downloads the View's WebAssembly lens, runs it against the primitives it receives from Indexers, and writes the resulting documents to its local DefraDB. Applications query those documents over GraphQL.
Attestations
When a Host receives the same block from multiple independent Indexers, it verifies each signature and creates an AttestationRecord that tracks how many Indexers produced identical data. These records replicate between Hosts using a P-counter CRDT, which lets applications check how many independent sources agree on a piece of data before trusting it.
Indexers are the write side of the network. Hosts are the read side.
Supported networks
Hosts can serve data for any chain Shinzo supports. Ethereum Mainnet is live today, and additional chains are being added. Any View registered against a supported source chain can be loaded and served by a Host. The current list of supported chains is at shinzo.network/chains.
Running a Host
The Shinzo team publishes a reference implementation, the Shinzo Host Client, which is the recommended way to participate in the network. You can run it locally for development or deploy it on a virtual machine for production.
See the Host Quick Start for installation, configuration, and registration steps.
Related reading
The Architecture overview covers how the Host connects to the rest of the stack, including the Indexer P2P layer, ShinzoHub registration, the attestation pipeline, and View distribution. The Host client reference goes deeper into the client internals.