Dash Core has launched a developer documentation portal to outline the inner workings and details of the Dash codebase.

Dash Core contractor ThePhez explains the portal’s purpose of creating a developer resource to take pressure off of Dash’s developers:

“It’s basically to try to get a good set of documentation out there for people interested in the details and relieve some load from the only people who had good understanding of it (i.e. Core developers). It started with the proposal that [Dash Core developer] Quantum got passed last year for updating the BIPs actually. I worked on that for him and it led into this.”

First announced in the Dash official roadmap under the title “Launch of a read-only/view-only portal for project documentation which will be open to the entire community (to ensure transparency)” scheduled for September of 2017, this project was modeled after the developer portal of Bitcoin.org, the main site for Bitcoin, according to ThePhez:

“Bitcoin.org had a great set of documentation and there’s a lot of technical overlap. But all the great Dash-specific stuff was obviously missing. So I forked their site and got to work.”

A full, in-depth documentation resource to simplify questions for developers

ThePhez sees this as a way for both curious regular users and developers to dig deeply into Dash’s technical specifications without having to access the source code itself:

“The goal is to provide easy access to relevant Dash protocol info without having to dig through the Dash Core source code to find it. Primarily intended for developers, probably. It provides them with technical details of the protocol in a fairly language agnostic way (i.e. no need to know C++). It hopefully bridges some of the gap between the source code level and the great guides that [Dash Core’s documentation and wiki lead] Strophy puts out which are generally at a higher level. Personally, I found Bitcoin.org immensely helpful when I was first trying to understand Bitcoin at the network protocol level so I was glad to be able to contribute to Dash by adding the details relevant to us to a similar site.”

While based on the original Bitcoin codebase, and drawing heavily from its innovations as the forerunner of modern cryptocurrency, Dash has nonetheless pioneered a host of innovations. Many of these, such as PrivateSend, InstantSend, masternodes, and a treasury, have been reprised countless times, while others, such as spork technology, thus far remain unique to Dash. The upcoming Evolution platform promises to unveil a host of new and unique innovations, such as the Dash Drive and DAPI. Having a thorough documentation portal, therefore, will be crucial for Dash’s continuing ecosystem development, and will serve as a source of inspiration for other projects as well.

Dash’s ambitious 2018 development roadmap

Dash has a full development schedule for 2018. According to the official roadmap, the public release of Dash’s platform codenamed Evolution is slated for summer of 2018, and recent communications with developers confirm that a minimum viable product is still scheduled for a summer release date. This will likely include a user-friendly wallet with username and password replacing public and private keys front-end, while maintaining Dash’s original workings back-end, as well as a friending process.