Masternode owners vote for Dash treasury funding proposals.  Those that pass get funded.  So it makes sense that tools which help manage masternodes would be popular.

Dash Masternode Tool

In the last cycle one of the proposals with the highest net votes was:

DashMasternodeTool – development boost
Owner: Bertrand256  Monthly amount: 66 DASH ($296/D – $19,500) for 2 months (added on 2017-09-16) Votes: 1046 Yes / 3 No / 1 Abstain  (approx $39K at time of entry)

Which funded development on a GUI tool that helps masternode owners secure their collateral and perform other similar functions.

Shortly after I’ve stumbled upon the Dash technology (of course, thanks to Amanda’s videos), Dash began to surge in value and thus I became interested in the matter of masternode collateral security. Earlier, the collateral was usually controlled by the Dash-QT software wallet, but its value was now too high for the solution to be considered safe in an era of ubiquitous malware. There was already a great solution at the time (chaeplin’s dashmnb) that made it possible to secure the collateral with a hardware wallet (e.g. Trezor), but some people put off migrating to it since it lacked a GUI, which may have been an obstacle to non-technical users. I decided to give chaeplin’s creation a graphical form – this is how Dash Masternode Tool (DMT) came to be.

The first version of this tool was published back in March of 2017.  The dash.org forum post shows the level of commitment Bertrand256 has to the project – there are 6 pages of comments – highlighting new releases and feature requests.  He has recently incorporated proposal voting into the project with plans for additional functionality.

This proposal will allow Bertrand256 to work fulltime on the DMT project for a period of 2 months (or 4 months), thereby accelerating the implementation of the following functionalities:

  • Support for Ledger Nano S hardware wallets – this requires a significant amount of work considering the limited support from Ledger company.
  • Changing the view in the main window of the app in order to see a full list of masternodes, which will allow the user to perform actions on multiple masternodes at once.
  • Retrieving additional important information regarding masternodes and the machines they run on, e.g. free RAM and disk space, payment queue position etc and display them in the masternodes’ list.
  • Further development of the masternode funds-sending feature – the goal is to make it a full-fledged wallet that will ensure full control over transactions (UTXO) users want to send.
  • Encryption of the app’s configuration file using a hardware wallet – the file contains sensitive information some users would prefer to hide in case their computer gets into the wrong hands.
  • Adding a documentation chapter that describes the preparation of the development environment and the executable files compilation method as well as adding chapters related to new features.
  • Having the entire project documentation proofread and corrected by a professional translation company in order to ensure that the project looks professional in that aspect as well (my English is far from perfect, so the documentation contains many errors).
  • Doing the same to all messages displayed by the program.
  • Adapting the program to work with the TESTNET.
  • Eliminating many of the simplifications and trade-offs made in the app, which will improve its stability and user-friendliness.

Adding support for the Ledger Nano S will be a major undertaking and a big deal for masternode owners.

secure.DASH.run

Easy and secure Masternode starting from web browser and hardware wallet
Owner: Defacto   95 DASH ($75.91/D – $7,211) (added on 2017-04-27) Votes: 1019 Yes / 108 No / 24 Abstain  

This proposal funded the creation of secure.DASH.run which is a website devoted to Dash masternode owners to also allow them to setup their masternode with secure hardware wallets like the Trezor.

With this website You can very quickly start Masternode on Mainnet or Testnet in secure way (even from internet caffe being on vacations!). There is no need to use custom firmwares, installing anything more that is needed to use Trezor (i mean more than trezor bridge). No python, no logging to remote servers, no using Dash Core wallet. You can just use Your browser and Trezor! The idea behind this is that this site should be most user friendly and even more secure. All crucial and confidential actions (signing, etc) are done in Trezor and browser. Your Masternode private key NEVER leaves Your computer and it’s NEVER being transmited. I hope that I achieved goal of easienest 🙂

The site at this point is quite well tested (thx Splawik21 for testing and moral support!) and it’s ready to use. It’s even accepted by SatoshiLabs (creators of Trezor)! I hope that anyone will like it!

Not running any masternodes I can’t personally comment on the differences between the two projects.  They do seem to overlap some which I guess is fine.  Trusted members of the Dash community have been involved with both projects.

Other Masternode Tools

Dash.org Proposal Entry site.

DashCentral is the main site for “proposal management” where most people enter their proposal and where (I think) most masternode owners vote.

Dash Vote Tracker this is the best site for an “overview” of active or past proposals votes.  It has links to the content on Dash Central.

Dash Ninja is the site with the most “nerdy” information it is the place to go to see the actual payments associated proposals and some other masternode tools.

Dash Treasury is a newer site that allows for entry of pre-proposals and proposals.

An earlier article on a similar topic “Dash Decentralized Governance Blockchain Budget System Review” covered the actual proposal voting process.