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Developers don’t need to run any nodes to use ZK Compression.
To connect to public networks (i.e., Devnet, Mainnet-Beta), you can either work with an RPC infrastructure provider that supports ZK Compression, such as Helius Labs, or run your own nodes.
There are three different types of nodes:
  • Photon RPC nodes
  • Prover nodes
  • Light forester nodes

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Photon Indexer Node

Indexer nodes use an existing connection to a Solana RPC full node to parse the transactions involving Light Protocol programs, enabling clients to read and write zk-compressed state. The canonical ZK Compression indexer is named Photon and is maintained by Helius Labs. It is fully open-source, and can be run locally. To set it up, simply point it to an existing Solana RPC. See the Github repo for more info.

GitHub - helius-labs/photon

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Prover Node

Provers generate validity proofs for state inclusion and PDA uniqueness on behalf of app developers Prover nodes can be operated either standalone or with an RPC node: in its default configuration, the Photon RPC node implementation by Helius Labs bundles a Prover node. The ZK Compression RPC API specification supports proof generation via the getValidityProof endpoint, making it easy to serve proofs using regular RPC methods via the same port. Please refer to the Github repo for more info:

https://github.com/Lightprotocol/light-protocol/tree/main/light-prover

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Forester Node

These nodes manage the creation, rollover, and updating of shared and program-owned state trees. Running a forester node is permissionless for your own state trees.

light-protocol/forester at main · Lightprotocol/light-protocol