It is always interesting to see technological solutions evolve. After all, change is the only constant thing in life. Terms like mining, hodling, proof of work, proof of stake, and masternodes, amongst others, have become quite popular. And you can be certain that this nascent technology still has a long way to go.

Dash, which originally developed the masternode concept has announced a new update – Long Living Masternode Quorums (LLMQs). Alexander Block who is a core developer at Dash, shared in an official blog post, saying: “We’re very happy to introduce the community to another concept that is currently under development: Long Living Masternode Quorums, or simply LLMQs.”

Understanding LLMQ

One of the primary hurdles hindering widespread adoption of blockchain solutions is scalability. Current frameworks do not scale very well. For Dash, the old framework functions by sending each individual vote from members of a quorum, to all the nodes in the network. The nodes are responsible for verifying and storing the votes. This process loads the overall network.

A quorum is a collection of entities that are able to vote on something. Every member is generally allowed to vote only once. If >= 51% vote for the same thing, majority is reached. Something either got the majority of votes or not, there should be nothing in between.

Instead of sending all votes to nodes to verify, LLMQs assigns the responsibility of validation and propagation of individual votes to members of the quorum. What is then sent to the network is the final result. The final result is a single BLS signature and this in turn reduces the load on the network.