Shielded Labs Crosslink Deployment status update

Hi all,

A quick update on the past few weeks:

  • We’ve completed a first pass at the scoping definition for the project which describes the high level product goals, rationale, and some trade-offs.
  • Drilling down a level to the implementation and deployment engineering work, we’ve completed a first pass at high level engineering deliverables.
  • Additionally we’ve continued to interview some good candidates and I’m pretty pleased with the quality of applicants were getting. My ideal is that our engineering team would grow from just me (currently part time) to 2-4 engineers, hopefully with the first starting in January. However, as always with hiring, there’s no guarantee about timing.

I’d like to call out one piece of the engineering deliverables that has emerged and continuing to evolve:

Our goal is for the deployment to succeed successfully to production (assuming community support) and then to see real users benefiting from the changes. How to assess how successful that is can be especially tricky, since our team ultimately will just put out tools and it’s up to the ecosystem and users to use them. Our approach to staying accountable and achieving our goal of actual usage is to engage early with strategic partners which represent a range of stake holders, and to rely on their feedback pre-deployment to measure if we’re on track for real world usage.

To make that clearer with examples: we want to hear from wallet dev teams, aspiring validator users, high quality centralized exchanges, bridging protocol teams, etc… if they are satisfied with the direction and maturity of Crosslink Deployment well before mainnet activation.

So stay tuned, we’ll be formalizing those stakeholder partner relationships down the road.

See you at the Arborist call!

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Oh, an in-progress item is that I’ve started attempting to replicate the zebra CI for a new fork at GitHub - ShieldedLabs/zebra-crosslink: Zcash - Zebra Crosslink Prototype 🦓 . It is much more sophisticated than I anticipated!

I’m looking for any “intro guide / tour” help with any Zebra CI experts. We’ll probably only use a subset during our prototype phase.

I’ll bring this up in Arborist today.

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