NU8 Decision Framework

Governance
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The Crosslink discussion has surfaced a question the community has not yet answered.

Two standards are now on the table. @joshs has called for “significant testing, scrutiny, and overwhelming consensus of support and viability.” @aquietinvestor has proposed “testing, independent review, and community governance.” Both include testing. They diverge on what comes after.

One sets a threshold for activation. The other describes a process for reaching a decision. These are not interchangeable. The outcome of NU8 may depend less on the technical merits of any single proposal than on which standard the community adopts for evaluating all of them.

Shielded Labs has executed well. Milestones 1 through 4 landed on or ahead of schedule. The January workshop demonstrated live staking and finalization on testnet. Nikete’s independent design review surfaced real tradeoffs in safety, liveness, and fork choice that deserve continued scrutiny. The engineering work is progressing. The governance work has not kept pace.

Several proposals are now competing for NU8 scope. Crosslink addresses finality and reorg resistance. 25s blocks address inclusion latency. Tachyon addresses scalability. Each solves a different problem. The community has no shared framework for comparing them, sequencing them, or determining what constitutes sufficient support for activation.

A few questions that need answers before scope is decided:

What constitutes sufficient community support for a consensus mechanism change?

Who evaluates technical readiness, and against what criteria?

How are competing proposals compared when they solve different problems?

What happens when support exists but is not unanimous?

This is not a call to delay any specific proposal. Shielded Labs has earned their seat at the table through consistent delivery. But delivery alone does not resolve the governance question underneath. The standard for changing the consensus mechanism of the most important privacy protocol needs to be defined before NU8 is scoped, not after.

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I don’t think there are two standards here. We’re mostly using different words to describe the same thing: thorough testing, independent review, and strong community support before activation. In practice, that includes both the process for evaluating proposals and the level of confidence required before moving forward. I don’t see a disagreement on what’s required for Crosslink.

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I tried really hard to see two different things as you described and I couldn’t - I agree with @aquietinvestor.

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Thanks @aquietinvestor and @tloriato. The overlap is real. Both descriptions include testing, review, and community support. I am not suggesting otherwise.

The question is narrower than whether there is disagreement on what Crosslink requires. It is whether the community has defined what any consensus mechanism change requires.

After testing and review are complete, what bar applies? If a proposal has strong support but not unanimous support, does it activate? That is not a hypothetical. It is the decision NU8 will eventually require, and the answer is not yet written down.

The four questions in the original post apply equally to Crosslink, 25s blocks, and Tachyon. They are not Crosslink-specific. Answering them now, before any proposal reaches the activation stage, reduces friction for everyone when the time comes.

If the community does agree on the standard, that agreement benefits every proposal including Crosslink. Defining the process is not a barrier. It is the foundation.