ANNOUNCING: The Genesis Release

As you may have heard, Dash’s Evolution platform, many many years in the making, is finally set to be released. We have an official date now: July 29th. Very exciting!

But we’re doing an early release. Here’s the quick story on how and why:

Back in 2015, Dash’s founder Evan Duffield envisioned a cryptocurrency experience that even your grandma could use. He called this vision “Evolution” and it included usernames, contact lists, invoicing, recurring payments, and more, all at the protocol level.

It took a couple years to envision exactly how to do this, and then a few more years of development, with numerous delays along the way. That’s a story for another day, but after Samuel (aka Quantum Explorer) Westrich took over as CTO of the Core team, developers really got dialed in and worked long hours, finally getting it done and ready for initial release:

“After 9 years since it’s first mention, and 3 years since I started leading the endeavor, Dash Evolution will be released as a Mainnet Beta on July 29th. Included will be the first of its kind Queryable Decentralized Database and Decentralized API.

As 2024 came and the team was still scrambling with the finishing touches, the community was getting impatient. So Sam put out a governance proposal to ask the community: Do we get everything working perfectly and release then? Or do we just release now, and deal with potential bumps when they come?

It was a close vote, but the supermajority (2/3) of masternodes and EvoNodes voted to release ASAP.

Thus begins the Genesis phase

We’re releasing the full MVP Evolution version. Then, the immediate goal will be to make sure the network is stable, fix whatever may break. Next is DPNS (Dash Platform Name Service) and DashPay activation. Finally, after all of the above, the Genesis phase will be concluded, and the next version will be released with withdrawals enabled. Otherwise, the plan would have been to essentially finish all of the above first to the best of our abilities on testnet, and then release all of that on mainnet.

There’s precedent for this style of launch. Ethereum launched proof-of-stake without staking withdrawals enabled for months. Solana broke and repeatedly went down for years after launch. THORChain launched on “chaosnet”, a limited release where things were expected to break. We’re following this general example.

We’ve been building something really special: a decentralized application platform leveraging data contracts, data storage, identities, and more. Over the next weeks and months we’ll be publishing blog posts, documentation, videos, and more that go into detail about exactly what Evolution does and why it’s special.

Why did we build this? Because decentralized money just wasn’t in a state for average people to use without a data layer to fill in all the extra information and communication around how we use our money.

Either we build a full payments experience that’s decentralized top-to-bottom, or centralized companies and institutions will fill in the missing pieces around decentralized money. We can’t have that.

We can do better.

Bottom line is, we decided we won’t be waiting any longer. The world needs to have this as soon as is feasible.

Dash is the Evolution of money. Get ready for Genesis, launching July 29th. 🗓️