Update: Milestone 2 Complete
Shielded Labs is happy to announce that we have completed Milestone 2 on the above Crosslink roadmap. We started on April 1 and completed the work on May 16, which landed us 2 week aheads of schedule.
What was the goal?
Milestone 2 focused on building the first half of Crosslink’s hybrid consensus design:
A PoS devnet that finalizes Zcash PoW blocks.
Specifically, we implemented Crosslink PoS headers that point to real Zcash mainnet PoW block hashes. In later milestones, this linking will go both ways (PoS → PoW and PoW → PoS), enabling true finality.
We conducted a demo using a fixed roster of nodes, and held a workshop on Discord where we tried to spin up the devnet. It was successful!
Crosslink: Milestone #2 Workshop
- 0:00 Greetings and workshop explainer
- 3:00 Crosslink explainer
- 6:47 Question about block timing
- 11:17 Workshop begins! Solo Node + Visualizer Demo
- 16:36 Key derivation explainer
- 22:45 Workshop: Config file editing
- 35:00 Workshop: First block mined!!
Links and references
- The main branch at our ShieldedLabs/zebra-crosslink still contains the code for this, available to try via
cargo run. - We added write functionality to the visualizer, which will allow us to interactively create Crosslink test vectors to test things like rollbacks, indeterminate block ordering, etc.
- We have updated the Zebra book to include a Crosslink section.
Finally, we have begun outreach to ecosystem partners such as wallet developers. More to come!
Please get in touch if you have any ideas, questions, comments, or suggestions!