Michelangelo.zec ⓩ🛡️

I’m confused by the outrage from certain people around Crosslink. At this point, it’s an R&D effort. There’s no activation proposal or ZIPs, and it isn’t on the mainnet roadmap. It’s a prototype design that we’re testing and iterating on. Research and experimentation are good for Zcash. Permissionless innovation means people can explore ideas without first securing everyone’s agreement, and the Zcash community should encourage that. Good-faith debate is how Zcash improves, and we welcome scrutiny of Crosslink’s design, assumptions, and tradeoffs. We’re working on Crosslink because we think stronger protection against reorg and rollback attacks may be a necessary security upgrade for Zcash at some point. AI or other forces could eventually challenge the security assumptions behind PoW, and our thesis is that a hybrid model may offer stronger security than either pure PoW or pure PoS. Shielded Labs’ mission is to protect the long-term security of Zcash. It’s a common theme across all our projects, including Crosslink, the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), and Epoch. We also demonstrated that commitment by bringing on Taylor Hornby as a security researcher to use AI tools to identify potential vulnerabilities, which uncovered the Orchard counterfeiting bug. We want to address potential risks before they become urgent, and recent events have shown the value of being forward-looking. The burden of proof is on us. If we want Crosslink included in a future network upgrade, it’s our responsibility to demonstrate consensus. But that’s still a long way off. For now, we’re focused on improving the design, incorporating user feedback, and working toward a production-ready implementation for the community and coinholders to evaluate. There’s still a lot of work to do before we’d propose Crosslink for mainnet, and we plan to run it on testnet for an extended period of time. If you disagree with Crosslink, challenge the design and help us understand what we’re missing. We all want Zcash to succeed. Let’s focus on strengthening and protecting Zcash as a whole by giving research and experimentation room to happen. If you're interested in learning more about Crosslink or participating in the incentivized testnet, feel free to DM me.