How this works
What this mirror is, what it is not, and what each choice costs you.
A mirror of the official snapshot
The Monad Foundation publishes a mainnet snapshot at bucket.monadinfra.com/snapshots/mainnet every few hours: a TrieDB dump made with monad-cli --dump-binary-snapshot, packed as tar.zst, with a sha256 next to it. Every five minutes our server asks whether a new one has appeared. When it has, the server:
- downloads it in 8 parallel ranges into a temporary file;
- computes the sha256 of the whole file and compares it with the official
.checksum— on a mismatch it publishes nothing; - moves the file into place, then swaps
latest.txtand the manifest, so nobody ever sees a half-written snapshot; - keeps the two most recent snapshots and removes older ones.
The layout is the official one on purpose: the official restore-from-snapshot.sh works against this mirror with one line changed. Nothing in the files is ours.
Why not our own snapshots, yet
We run a Monad mainnet node and tried dumping its TrieDB while it runs. The dump opens the database read-only and is safe in itself, but it competes with the node for the same drive. On our server that drive is virtual, not a dedicated NVMe, and the numbers were:
| Dump read limit | Dump speed | Our node |
|---|---|---|
| none | 10–15 MB/s | 43–84 blocks behind within 90 s — stopped by our watchdog |
| 800 reads/s on the TrieDB drive | ~2.5 MB/s | at most 7 blocks behind |
| 1500 reads/s | ~4 MB/s | 49 blocks behind in 3 minutes — stopped |
At a rate the node survives, one dump takes hours — no fresher than the official snapshot. Our own dumps need a node with spare TrieDB bandwidth; until then, mirroring the official file honestly is the better offer.
What you get, and what you do not
- the official snapshot within minutes of its release, from a second source
- its sha256 checked before anything is published
- one command that runs the official scripts end to end, forkpoint included
- the snapshot's age, block and size on one page, with their sources
- a fresher state than the Monad Foundation's — it is the same file
- a node installed from nothing — the package, keys and config come from the official guide
- archive history — a snapshot is the latest state only