It’s time to end the USAID of Zcash.

In its first 10 years, Zcash has successfully activated 10 major network upgrades. Overwinter laying the foundations, Sapling making shielded payments possible on mobile, Blossom halving block times, NU5 eliminating trusted setups, to NU6.3 Ironwood strengthening supply integrity through formal verification. Built to evolve. Designed to endure 🛡️

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.

NU7 is finally activating on Zcash! Zakura 1.7.0 activates it on height 3543405, which is the evening of November 5 for us Americans. Blocks will occur three times faster in Zcash. Other changes like NSM funding and retiring the Sprout pool appear in this upgrade as well.

As the Zcash Türkiye team, we are organizing a Campus Tour that will initially cover 10 universities. We plan to give each participating student $5 worth of ZEC to help them experience Zcash for the first time. Initially, we were planning to distribute the funds manually. However, we really liked the QR code-based reward system we saw at the last event. So, we wanted to ask whether Zodl or Vizor would be interested in supporting us with this initiative. We estimate that the tour could generate around 700–900 new wallet downloads and first ZEC transactions. Here’s our proposal: we would provide $5 worth of ZEC to each student, and you could contribute an additional $5. This would allow us to give each student a total of $10 worth of ZEC. We could distribute the rewards through QR codes instead of handling everything manually, making the process much easier and more engaging. The QR code design could be entirely up to you. Our main goal is to make it easy for students to set up their wallets and complete their first ZEC transactions smoothly. @vizorwallet @zodl_app @zodl_support