Dash, a payments-focused digital currency, announced on Tuesday its roadmap for Evolution, as well as ambitious plans for 2017 through to 2020 and beyond. According to Dash, the eight-page roadmap is now publicly available on its website and details a phased launch of its landmark product, a decentralized payments platform designed to be completely secure, merchant and consumer friendly, globally accessible, instant, available on any computer or device, and with fees far cheaper than competing payment methods.

CEO of Dash Core Ryan Taylor stated:

“DashEvolution will dramatically improve the experience of using a digital currency. Our aim with Evolution is to tear down the barriers to adoption for both merchants and consumers so that any person, no matter their age, nationality, education, or technical proficiency, can use digital currency everyday and for almost any purpose. Think of Evolution as online payments, a system similar to PayPal or Venmo, but completely decentralized, so that a user is always in control of his or her own money. Moreover, Evolution will be incredibly inexpensive, with no cross-border fees or restrictions. Disruptive innovation in the payments space is accelerating; with our approach, Dash could be the first to bring digital currency to a truly massive audience.”

Evolution will join Dash’s list of upgrades that will allow the protocol to handle hundreds of millions of on-chain transactions a day, confirmed within a few seconds. CTO of Dash Core Andy Freer commented:

“We are already in talks with channel partners who have access to thousands of merchants; the days of losing 3% cuts against each sale are numbered. Through continuous development and testing phases, Dash will begin onboarding merchants, fiat converters, gateway services and users, listen closely to their feedback, and adjust the platform accordingly. Evolution is a massive endeavor with gigantic promises, but we will accomplish our goals through the help of an All-Star team of dozens of the world’s best programmers, researchers, project managers, technologists, and user experience experts. We’re working every day to ensure that Evolution will be a superior payments option embraced by millions.”

Dash revealed that it plans to enable a high volume of transactions at physical points of sale, on devices, and through online transfers simultaneously through a Proof of Service masternode model and with the assistance of Dash-specific hardware chips capable of processing orders of magnitude faster than general-purpose computing platforms. The hardware project will be spearheaded by Dash’s new scientific and research branch, Dash Labs. Freer continued:

“Dash Labs will be responsible for the research and development of custom, open-source hardware, including specialized chips for accelerated processing of blocks. We’ve seen how difficult it is for a blockchain to scale, especially when adoption is growing so fast. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are having serious slow-downs when they approach 300,000 transactions per day. Ours is a different philosophy, one that actually aligns most closely with the Bitcoin inventor’s vision that nodes would eventually grow into individual server farms, with users accessing from lite clients. The P2P network becomes the backend of the currency, with the frontend comprised of the end-users.”

Dash then noted it will reduce mining imbalances seen in other Proof of Work networks and enable enhanced on-chain scaling because their system provides compensation for running the hardware needed to service the network. Taylor added: