OFFICIAL DASH ROADMAP
Version 2.1.2 // Delivery Milestones
Evan Duffield / evan@dash.org / Dash Labs
Andy Freer / andy@dash.org / Dash Core CTO
Dash Evolution will be the first user-friendly and scalable digital currency platform suitable for mass adoption. Because this is such an ambitious goal, we’ve created a detailed roadmap to guide development. Evolution will be launched in three stages. Each release will increase the processing power, ease of use, feature set, and scalability of the network.
We intend to increase the user capacity of the network by an order of magnitude with each new stage of development. Furthermore, because of increases in the amount of available budget funding, we will be able to grow the development team rapidly. We plan to double the number of developers with each release, allowing us to accelerate the implementation of each phase.
We intend to schedule releases of Dash Evolution in a way that produces a high-quality product and provides a user-friendly experience. In addition to emphasizing quality and user experience, we will use each incremental release as a robust framework for future development. The Dash Core Team believes that taking the time to create a high quality product will create the most value over the long term. A quick rush to market would likely result in an inferior product that causes temporary price growth but long-term stagnation or decline.
Several new technologies are required to deliver such an excellent user experience. These technologies will expand the capabilities of the backbone infrastructure supporting the network and will ensure that it is capable of handling the transaction loads and data storage requirements of a mass-market user base.
Masternodes will scale and be tested using a system called ”state transitions.” This system will provide a mathematically predictable way of determining the quality of service that masternodes provide. Full access to the blockchain will be required to perform proper state transitions of user objects, which will reference governance objects and blockchain transactions to perform quorum operations. Masternodes which fall under a threshold of activity will automatically be removed from the masternode list using a new system called “masternode blocks.”
DashDrive will be implemented using software called IPFS, a user-friendly and popular P2P file system which will automatically handle most of the network’s sharing, redundancy and syncing operations. IPFS writes will utilize masternode quorums for security. DashDrive is an internal facing system that stores user objects within the network in a decentralized way. There is no public-facing system for storage of non-Dash related information. DashDrive is not a replacement for consumer and enterprise applications like Dropbox; it’s a mechanism to allow smooth functioning of the network.
Network operations will scale using a targeted model to allow for exponential growth. Hardware requirements for masternodes will gradually increase to power a larger network that services more users with greater functionality. When the first phase of Evolution is deployed, masternodes will face new hard disk requirements. They will need both a solid state drive (for faster retrieval of blockchain data) and an ordinary hard disk with higher storage capacity. Eventually the network will finance the creation of masternode-specific hardware with custom requirements. Such hardware will allow massive parallelization of transaction processing, hashing, and other system functions. More powerful hardware will increase the throughput of the network significantly. This hardware will be entirely open source and non-exploitable and will connect to commodity hardware for additional storage capacity.
Over the past few months we have been rapidly increasing the size of our development team in order to accelerate delivery of Evolution. In the meantime, a number of Core developers have been focused on delivering and implementing Dash 12.1. This update was absolutely vital, serving as a link between the existing Dash codebase and future Evolution releases. Now that 12.1 has been successfully rolled out, our entire development team is transitioning to work on Evolution.
In order to create a quality product as quickly as possible, the team had to create a solid foundation. We had to carefully plan the project’s roadmap, create enormous amounts of documentation, and do significant research to ensure that we do not make time- and resource-wasting mistakes during the creation of Evolution. We will soon be opening a vast amount of private documentation to the community, ensuring complete transparency of our development work. This phase of the project is coming to a close, with the entire team now beginning to focus on creating the actual codebase for Evolution.
We would also like to announce the creation of a new team to be centered in Hong Kong, called Dash Labs. This team will be the scientific arm of the project, focusing on research and the development of custom hardware. Evan Duffield and Andy Freer are heading up this team. Dash Labs aims to create the first open-source versions of many different types of hardware. Our goal is to help the digital currency space to remain open and transparent, while reducing the economic advantages of closed-source proprietary technology. For example, advanced open-source ASICs would eliminate most of the advantages of privately-developed ASICs. As a result, mining centralization could be significantly reduced. All economic actors will have a level playing field, at least with respect to hardware solutions.
Full article at https://github.com/dashpay/dash-roadmap/blob/master/README.md