March 27, 2019 6:58 pm

Open-Sourcing Software Repositories

Hey Dash community!

I’m so happy to announce the open-sourcing of our Dash Platform software repositories, including our Distributed API (DAPI) and Drive. The Dash Platform is one of 3 parts, along with Core and DashPay Wallet, which together collectively form what is commonly known as Evolution.

The process is in the final stages. We’ve been silently releasing in batches, in an order which makes sense based on dependencies (so, more foundational components are released first, then higher-level afterwards). This on-going effort should be finished by the end of this month. If you’re watching closely, you’ve probably seen a few repositories already published, such as js-dpp, our Javascript implementation of the layer 2 consensus protocol.

Creating software for decentralized p2p networks is quite complex. Many pieces had to be laid down in a specific order to establish a foundation, and more than once we’ve had to return to the drawing board and rethink how we implement some specific item, e.g. quorums or DAPI sessions (as an example, we’re now using LLMQs for much of this).

That said, I’d like to state that this software is still relatively new and changing fast. It’s somewhere between alpha and beta level. Please help us test it out! 🙂 One huge benefit of opening this codebase is the number of eyes we’ll get on it. You will find bugs, and we hope you’ll report them — or better yet, submit Pull Requests to help us fix them!

The entire development team is really excited and has been itching to get these projects released to the community. I’m super proud of them for everything they’ve accomplished to create this code, and grateful for the support of the rest of the team and the community to help us get where we are now. It’s definitely been a team endeavor and we couldn’t have arrived here without the combined efforts of everyone involved.

Please note that Dash Core Group actually has two organizations on GitHub due to historical, technical and security reasons:

https://github.com/dashpay

https://github.com/dashevo

We maintain this structure still because we keep membership in the dashpay org very small (as this contains the Core and Sentinel software), and components related to the 2nd layer, AKA the Dash Platform, are kept in dashevo. This is actually pretty common for many organizations, and among other things, helps to reduce blast radius should something go awry.

Thanks for your support and patience leading up to publishing these repositories!


About the author


Nathan Marley