Mechanism Design Audit of Crosslink Zebra

2025-12-11

This design review audit was initiated as the Shielded Labs team approached the final stretch of their prototyping phase (see the Roadmap for the current status). This was useful timing between prototyping enough to have confidence the design is feasible for production versus too late in the process when the design is already "baked" to get a mechanism-design focused review of the consensus safety.

This design focused on the core safety and reliability of Crosslink as a consensus foundation, and not on other crucial concerns like privacy, usability, the code implementation, and so on.

Pre-Registration Process

Shielded Labs undertook a "pre-registration" process for this design audit by publicly committing to the scope and deliverables prior to engaging in the audit so that the public can verify we did not "shift the goal posts" after learning details from the auditor in order to influence the perception of the findings.

Precommitted Proposal for this audit.