Dash Unveils Evolution Roadmap and Three-Year Plan

June 27th, 2017 at 10:10 pm UTC · 5 min read

Dash, the world’s leading payments-focused digital currency, has today unveiled its highly anticipated roadmap for Evolution, as well as ambitious plans for 2017 through to 2020 and beyond.

The eight-page roadmap, now publicly available on Dash’s website, details a phased launch of its landmark product, a decentralized payments platform designed to be completely secure, merchant and consumer friendly, globally accessible, instant, available on any computer or device, and with fees far cheaper than competing payment methods. 

Dash Evolution, under design for nearly a year and a half and now two thirds of the way through development, is set for a full public launch in June 2018. The Evolution Alpha test release is scheduled for December for select business partners. A limited set of Evolution functions will be deployed to mainnet in February with the full release of Evolution scheduled for June.

CEO of Dash Core Ryan Taylor said, “Dash Evolution will dramatically improve the experience of using a digital currency. Our aim with Evolution is to tear down the barriers to adoption for both merchants and consumers so that any person, no matter their age, nationality, education, or technical proficiency, can use digital currency everyday and for almost any purpose. Think of Evolution as online payments, a system similar to PayPal or Venmo, but completely decentralized, so that a user is always in control of his or her own money. Moreover, Evolution will be incredibly inexpensive, with no cross-border fees or restrictions. Disruptive innovation in the payments space is accelerating; with our approach, Dash could be the first to bring digital currency to a truly massive audience.”

Evolution will join Dash’s comprehensive list of upgrades that will allow the protocol to handle hundreds of millions of on-chain transactions a day, confirmed within a few seconds.

CTO of Dash Core Andy Freer said, “We are already in talks with channel partners who have access to thousands of merchants; the days of losing 3% cuts against each sale are numbered. Through continuous development and testing phases, Dash will begin onboarding merchants, fiat converters, gateway services and users, listen closely to their feedback, and adjust the platform accordingly. 

Evolution is a massive endeavor with gigantic promises, but we will accomplish our goals through the help of an All-Star team of dozens of the world’s best programmers, researchers, project managers, technologists, and user experience experts. We’re working every day to ensure that Evolution will be a superior payments option embraced by millions.”

Dash plans to enable a high volume of transactions at physical points of sale, on devices, and through online transfers simultaneously through a Proof of Service masternode model and with the assistance of Dash-specific hardware chips capable of processing orders of magnitude faster than general-purpose computing platforms. The hardware project will be spearheaded by Dash’s new scientific and research branch, Dash Labs, led by CTO Andy Freer and Founder & Senior Advisor Evan Duffield.

Dash Labs will be responsible for the research and development of custom, open-source hardware, including specialized chips for accelerated processing of blocks. We’ve seen how difficult it is for a blockchain to scale, especially when adoption is growing so fast. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are having serious slow-downs when they approach 300,000 transactions per day. Ours is a different philosophy, one that actually aligns most closely with the Bitcoin inventor’s vision that nodes would eventually grow into individual server farms, with users accessing from lite clients. The P2P network becomes the backend of the currency, with the frontend comprised of the end-users,” said Freer.

Dash will reduce mining imbalances seen in other Proof of Work networks and enable enhanced on-chain scaling because their system provides compensation for running the hardware needed to service the network. Masternodes will become more powerful over time, and the incentive model ensures that as Dash grows and the need for sophisticated hardware grows, providers are paid accordingly for their service.

Dash’s hardware ambitions are due to arrive in the year 2020, with plans to put masternode hardware on individual chips, allowing each masternode to scale to the point where they may occupy their own data center.

“We are delighted to announce our intentions to the world. The Dash community aims to reinvent money and how it works to create a world of financial opportunity and freedom on a massive scale. By providing the world’s first truly usable digital cash that can reach every person on earth with a phone, we believe the possibilities to transform people’s lives is immense,” said Taylor.

About Dash:
Dash is an open-source project that delivers safe decentralized financial solutions. Dash is like digital cash, spent easily and instantly online and at merchants and service providers worldwide. One of the world’s most highly valued cryptocurrencies, Dash is managed by a self-funded, self-governed organization comprised of over 15,000 users, moving tens of millions of dollars across the network every 24 hours. Transactions are verified by users running over 4400 master nodes across the world. Dash’s built-in governance and funding system allows projects to be proposed and voted on by the community, and if approved, paid for directly from the blockchain. Dash has many unique features including instant transfers, low fees, optional privacy and state-of-the-art security.

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