Running a frontend

Penumbra's web tooling is designed to support a decentralized ecosystem of frontends. This allows different frontend codebases to focus on different user profiles and ensures that no single frontend deployment or codebase has control over users' access to the protocol.

Penumbra wallets like Prax (opens in a new tab) sync, scan, decrypt, and locally index user data. When users connect to a frontend, the wallet acts as a "personal RPC", granting that frontend access to the user's private data.

This chapter has information about deploying various open-source Penumbra frontends, for users who do not wish to rely on existing third-party frontends:

• Minifront: the minimal, embeddable static-site frontend that runs entirely on the end-user device. A (possibly outdated) copy of Minifront is embedded in every single Penumbra fullnode and served on the RPC endpoint, but it can also be hosted standalone.

• Void.Vote: a governance-focused frontend that allows viewing and voting on governance proposals.

• Cuiloa: a developer-focused block explorer showing raw block, transaction, and event data.

• DEX Explorer: a DEX-focused explorer rendering DEX data.