Crosslink Milestone 5: Successfully Concluded
Pre-Productionization, Tech Debt, Final Refactoring
Zcashers,
We are happy to report that Milestone 5 for Crosslink was completed successfully.
Milestone 5 was transitional. We revisited the prototype-era design choices honestly, and from that critique scoped out the production-readiness roadmap for Crosslink through 2026. This work is complete., and our code is now durable enough to run continuously. The culmination of this work is the incentivized Crosslink Feature Net, launching today at our workshop
What is a “Feature Net”, and why is it incentivized?
A feature net is a network that exists to demonstrate, prove out, and develop specific features — in this case, Crosslink. For the broader network-naming context, see Zcash Network Kinds Terminology Proposal.
We run feature nets in successive seasons, like a TV show. Each new season is effectively a new network: new software, no shared ledger or consensus history with prior seasons. Participants can port over their finalizer identities and keep earning across transitions.
Season 1 begins today, April 15.
It’s incentivized because real economic outcomes are the only way to get real data in crypto. cTAZ earned through mining or staking converts pro rata to real ZEC at the end of each season. We’ve allocated 500 ZEC across the program, with 25 ZEC (5%) earmarked for Season 1. Later seasons will scale up as the network matures.
The golden rule: Only cTAZ earned via block rewards counts.
What shipped
- Monolith release: tagged build for macOS, Linux, and Windows, bundling miner, finalizer, wallet, and node into a single desktop app.
- Persistent Feature Net: Season 1 is running now. No more ephemeral demo nets; this one stays up and hardens under load.
- Incentive economy running end-to-end: cTAZ issuance via coinbase, BFT finalization, the staking-action lifecycle (bond, unbond, withdraw, retarget), and a faucet are all live. Shielded-pool integration for bonds, complete BFT block validation, and on-chain earned-vs-held reward tracking are still landing through the season.
For parameters, installation, staking mechanics, and FAQ, see crosslink_monolith/releases.
A Note on Scheduling
M5 was scoped for February and shipped April 15. It took extra time to carefully scope out our next phase, and to sufficiently prepare the feature net.
We rewrote the network transport layer from scratch so PoW block sync could keep pace with Tendermint’s finality cadence. The native transport couldn’t, and the desync blocked everything downstream. Most of this work ran late March through mid-April, in collaboration with Nym and the Zcash Foundation, with input from the Tachyon team.
For more information on our networking work, see the Shielded Transport Pigeon (STP) repo.