Release Announcement: Dash Platform v0.18 on Testnet

Dash Core Group is pleased to announce the release of Dash Platform v0.18 on testnet. Compared to previous Evonet releases, the Dash Platform v0.17 release was deployed on a significantly larger network with a higher load, which introduced new types of challenges for the platform team. Consequently, the main focus of the v0.18 release was improving the stability of testnet and Dash Platform components.

In addition, updates to the DashPay wallets for Android and iOS are being verified on this new version of Dash Platform. Alpha Program users will receive an update next week after stability of the network has been confirmed.

Release Highlights

• Bug Fixing and Reliability Improvements: Tenderdash was updated with the most recent changes from Tendermint Core, thereby allowing us to mitigate issues with block time and abnormal mempool behavior. Also, the ABCI server, which is responsible for communication between Tenderdash and Drive, was rewritten from scratch to provide better reliability and error handling. Drive’s graceful shutdown process was improved to ensure state consistency in case of failures. Also, the platform team fixed dozens of other bugs in various components and made 19 hotfix releases on testnet, which can be viewed in the 0.17 hotfix release notes.
• Verbose Logging in Drive: Drive logs were enriched with a lot of useful information in order to better diagnose difficult-to-reproduce bugs and race conditions. They can also be configured with logging levels for different log file formats and enabled for specific Drive modules.
• Testnet Infrastructure improvements: Tenderdash seed nodes were set up on testnet to reduce the number of peer connections on network nodes, leading to bandwidth and load reduction. Drive logs from deployed masternodes are now being collected and available for analysis in Kibana. All of these new improvements are incorporated in the Dash Network Deploy Tool.
• Secure State Transition Acknowledgement: In previous versions, DAPI used the “development only” approach to signal to a client that a sent state transition has been accepted and executed. This method doesn’t work on large-scale networks since it doesn’t guarantee data propagation over the network and has significant security vulnerabilities. Dash Platform v0.18 has introduced a secure and reliable flow to retrieve state transaction execution results with cryptographic proofs.
• JavaScript Wallet Sync Improvements: The wallet now uses the same identity key derivation path as DashPay for Android and iOS. This makes it possible to sync an identity from an Android or iOS wallet in any JavaScript-based app. Also, synchronization errors now can be handled with the SDK client ‘error’ event, and the new ‘skipSynchronizationBeforeHeight’ option allows you to start synchronization from a specific block height for development and debug purposes.

Conclusion

The DCG development teams have been working diligently since the first release to testnet, fixing numerous bugs and stabilizing the platform for scale. As the teams continue working on Dash Platform, DCG plans to reexamine its release process in order to better support the continued, stable development of DashPay. In addition, the DashPay teams help make our platform releases more stable by conducting internal testing prior to a public release. This positive feedback loop will likely result in lengthier release cycles. DCG plans to follow up in the coming weeks with more concrete information around release expectations. That being said, observers can expect the next platform release to occur roughly 6 weeks from now around mid to late April.

Follow the Dash blog and social media channels for more releases and updates, and as usual, your thoughts, feedback, and pull requests are greatly appreciated.

Release Notes

• Drive v0.18
• Dash Platform Protocol v0.18
• DAPI v0.18
• DAPI Client v0.18
• DAPI gRPC v0.18
• Distribution Package v0.18
• Dash Network Deploy Tool v0.18
• Platform Test Suite v0.18
• Dash SDK (JS) v3.18.0
• Wallet-lib v7.18.0