Brown Bag Session – Platform Roadmap Reflections by Ivan Shumkov

Ivan Shumkov, the Dash Core Group Principal Engineer, recently shared his insights on the vision for Dash Platform. Here are highlights of what he discussed.

Ivan stated that the ultimate goal was to create a sleek and intuitive user experience. We will focus on a great user experience for both users and developers. To ensure developers have an easy time creating apps for Dash Platform, they have come up with an excellent service stack which allows developers to build using familiar tools, languages and concepts. Finally, our plan to implement full decentralization as the final goal.

Implementation of Data Contracts

To integrate applications with the platform, developers will have to create data contracts to describe the data structures for their application. Its analog is the use of database schema for document-based databases.

Data generated by users of an app will be validated against these contracts. Once validated, the app data will be committed to a database, where it will be stored within the masternode network. Masternodes will receive fees charged to users as compensation for hosting this data.

Data contracts are designed to accommodate as many use cases as possible. Work will also continue on making it easier to onboard developers.

Additionally, devs will work on smart contracts for Ethereum Virtual Machine, which is vital for interoperability with Ethereum, even after the MVP rollout.

Smart Contract Development

We also discussed our vision when it comes to smart contract development. Smart contracts will be used for logic, while data contracts will be used for data storage. Enabling smart contract functionality ensures that any DApps or video hosting sites can be designed using the platform. Developers can monetize their DApps and receive fees for contract execution. Its analog would be AWS hosting fees instead of a subscription-based model.

How We Will Achieve Full Decentralization

So how do we achieve full decentralization? Well, full decentralization would not be fulfilled immediately, but it is the eventual one of the goals of the platform.

To achieve full decentralization, a few key features are required. These are the decentralized API, called DAPI, the username layer called Dash Platform Name Service (DPNS), decentralized CDN (dCDN), data contracts, and wallet logins. The dCDN is particularly important for decentralized storage. This is because storing data on a data contract is quite expensive.

We believe that human-readable usernames, instead of a string of numbers and letters, are the future of wallet addresses. To this end, we plan to make improvements to DPNS, allowing users to use usernames to transact and accept friend requests.