The Dash Core team’s chief architect, Andy Freer, has announced his departure from the team to work on decentralized applications (DApps) for Dash.
In an announcement today, Freer indicated that he would be leaving the Dash Core team now that he feels design and development of the Evolution platform is sufficiently complete:
“Now that the Evo[lution] protocol design is pretty much complete and implementations are running on DevNet I feel my main work in Core is done and I met my commitment to Evan that I made back in 2016 to help move Dash beyond raw, hard to use payments to solve a mainstream, usable, scalable and economical cryptocurrency for the future.”
A key developer since Dash’s early days, Freer worked closely with Evan Duffield, Dash’s founder, on designing the network’s architecture for years. Freer believes that the current Dash Core development team is one of the best in the world, and can deliver tools to achieving real freedom for the world’s benefit:
“It’s been a pleasure and I feel privileged to have worked with so many smart and talented developers, I believe the dev team is the best in the space and provided they can appreciate and stay focused on Evan’s vision which is embodied in the current Evo[lution] design, I believe we have the potential to grow a usage and use case base much bigger than is imagined today with the current crypto space through which increased decentralization and personal independence in all aspects of people’s lives can only be a good thing, and I remain fully committed to that larger goal.”
Following Duffield’s departure from the Core team and Ryan Taylor’s transition from a finance role to CEO, Freer previously served as the team’s CTO. He transitioned to a role as chief architect when Bob Carroll took over as CTO this summer.
Dash Evolution platform will introduce a rich DApp ecosystem
In addition to announcing his departure from the Core team, Freer indicated that he would remain busy working in the Dash ecosystem, specifically with the development of DApps, decentralized applications built on top of the Evolution platform to provide a wide range of additional functionality for the network, which he believes will help lead to mass adoption:
“My main focus now after some downtime will be on creating DAPs for Evolution in some new flexible and creative capacity, i.e. writing DAPs and helping others to write DAPs, as its killer DAPs that will be the key to mainstream adoption of Dash currency by providing new incentives and reasons to signup, integrate, use and monetize with Dash online as a differential to centralized payment alternatives. Once that has traction, it will lead to a critical mass of Dash ownership to then warrant uptake within the larger financial system and commerce markets and actual mainstream payments.”
Originally envisioned purely as a way to provide a smooth and seamless user experience for cryptocurrency while maintaining full decentralization, the scope of Evolution has shifted over the years to include a full decentralized platform for DApps. As outlined in demo videos released this spring, Dash will allow anyone to develop DApps running on the platform, with data stored on the Dash Drive, a distributed storage system based on IPFS (interplanetary file system), with hashes referencing this data stored on the blockchain. This platform promises to enable numerous new use cases for the Dash network from end-to-end encrypted messaging, supply chain management, social networking, genome sequencing, and many more.
Dash development further decentralizes with a growing number of independent projects
Freer’s move to development elsewhere in the Dash ecosystem further continues the trend of decentralization and growth of Dash’s development. Dash’s founder created Dash Labs to work on research and development, and the organization recently released news that it has been working on the Dash Labs Data Collection Protocol, a decentralized platform for submitting academic research for peer review, facilitating access and monetization, using Dash. Arizona State University has also produced Dash-specific research, most notably scaling research showing that Dash’s network can easily grow to handle transaction levels approaching what PayPal currently processes.
Additional key development projects in the ecosystem include Dash Nexus, a platform for facilitating and streamlining the Dash treasury proposal and governance system, and MyDashWallet, a mobile and web wallet enabling additional functionality such as PrivateSend, hardware wallet support, seamless tipping across many platforms, integrated exchange into and out of other cryptocurrencies, and many more planned for the future. MyDashWallet also conducted an impromptu stress test increasing the record number of transactions processed in a single day far beyond that of Bitcoin, with a more extensive stress test planned for this weekend.
