Today is the first anniversary of the launch of Dash's Evolution network, almost nine years after it was first conceptualized.
On July 29th of 2024, the Dash Evolution Genesis upgrade was released on mainnet. Over the following few days it was locked in for activation, and the new chain began producing blocks on September 2nd. We're now one year into the biggest overhaul in Dash's technology in its entire existence.
Evolution was first conceptualized by our founder Evan Duffield. He delivered a public presentation at Bitcoin Wednesday in Amsterdam in the fall of 2015, offering a vision of cryptocurrency that wasn't nearly so clunky and hyper-technical for the end user. This included protocol-level usernames, contact lists, encrypted metadata like memos and invoices, savings accounts, all the trappings of modern personal finance, except without compromising one bit on decentralization, censorship-resistance, and sovereignty.
Now, for the past year, Dash has delivered just that. We have usernames, contact lists, and encrypted metadata, all without compromising user privacy. We have that smooth, "just works" experience for end users who want a simple and intuitive look and feel, but who want to use scarce, sound money in their full and complete self-custody without having to rely on any intermediaries.
But we delivered so much more than that. We exceeded Evan's vision.
First, we have a completely separate blockchain to deal with just data operations, with all the functional capabilities of modern data chains: tokens, NFTs, DEXes, DApps, and more. We achieve this in a much more lightweight way by leveraging data contracts: schemas that describe how data can be written and accessed. This allows us to do a lot of what smart contract chains do through computation, only in a much safer, less data-intensive, more efficient way. And for the parts that still need full programmability, we're working on adding VM support too. Dash truly will be able to do it all.
But the big innovation is in our first-of-its-kind data network. Thanks to breakthroughs in our data storage and proofs system, including the innovation of GroveDB, we're able to not only efficiently and instantly store data in a decentralized way, but allow users to instantly call up that data with precision. Dash's data is indexed, queryable, and with cryptographic proofs that you received the data you asked for, all through a decentralized API with no need to run your own node. This means no running, paying, or needing to trust an indexer or a node.
What this means is that you can run a truly decentralized Web3 experience without needing a back-end server. The technical blockages facing the rest of the space don't apply to Dash. We can start building the fully-decentralized web on Dash, using a scarce, secure, efficient digital sound money to power everything.
In the past year we've been in accelerated release mode: launch ASAP, build out guides and developer tools as we go. Despite that, however, we have X users on the network registering a total of Y usernames, with Z data contracts and P tokens. And we expect this to grow exponentially through the rest of the year and into the next as we bring more apps and more users onboard.
Evolution is only a baby. One year old. Yet we're still immensely proud of how far we've come. Join us in celebrating year one, and here's to many, many more years!