Four steps, and one of them is yours
There is not much to the pipeline, and that is the design rather than an omission. Every component we could remove between the validator and your socket is a component that cannot add latency or fail.
- 01
We take delivery near the validators
Shreds are broadcast by whichever validator is leader, to peers close to it in the network's propagation tree. We hold a position in Frankfurt where a large share of European stake sits, and take delivery from several independent upstreams at once.
Multiple sources is the part that matters. The same shred usually reaches us more than once, from different places, at slightly different times.
- 02
We keep the first copy and discard the rest
Deduplication happens on arrival. Whichever source delivered a given packet first is the one you get, so the feed is never slower than its best upstream on any individual packet.
This is also why a single upstream degrading is something you are unlikely to notice.
- 03
We forward the packet, unchanged
Every deduplicated packet goes to each active destination exactly as it arrived, from 64.130.40.90. Nothing is decoded, nothing is re-framed, nothing is buffered waiting for a block to complete.
The forwarding path is deliberately the dumbest component in the system, because the less it does the less it can add.
- 04
You receive the raw stream and decode it your way
Your socket sees UDP datagrams of at most 1228 bytes, exactly as the network produced them. You decide what to parse, what to skip and how fast to go, rather than inheriting somebody else's schema.
Our documentation covers the whole path, and the reference implementation is annotated end to end so you are not starting from a blank file.
What happens between paying and your first packet
You pay $100 on chain, in USDC or SOL. The email you use at checkout becomes your account, with no separate signup and no password. Sign in with a six digit code and add the address you want shreds sent to.
Before anything is delivered you prove you control that address. We send one datagram to it beginning SHRED-FANOUT-VERIFY/1 containing a token. You read it on the machine in question and paste the token back. Then delivery starts, and continues for 30 days.
We do this because UDP has no headers to authenticate and no handshake to trust. The only meaningful proof that an address is yours is that you can read what we send to it.
What we deliberately do not do
Decode anything. No parsed blocks, no gRPC, no filtered stream. Raw packets only.
Buffer or replay. This is a live forward. There is no backfill and no history to request.
Guarantee delivery. It is UDP. Loss is a property of the protocol, not a fault to report.
Renew automatically. No card on file, nothing charged without you starting it.
Check the one thing most likely to stop you
None of the above matters if inbound UDP never reaches your box, which is what actually goes wrong for most first setups. That is free to check and needs no account.