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Dash Core Group is releasing more Evolution code repositories to the public as it aims to further open-source the project that has been kept private from the rest of the Dash core code for competitive reasons.

Dash Evolution, long hidden from public view and sometimes rumored to never be coming, is finally coming out to where the greater public can have a look at it. https://t.co/IRxb4jNgNY — Joel Valenzuela (@TheDesertLynx) March 27, 2019

“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.”

A part of the software release will be the Distributed API (DAPI) and Drive code, which combined with Core and the DashPay Wallet create the larger Evolution release. The code has previously remained private until the team was confident enough to release it as a version ready enough for open-source collaboration while also maintaining a competitive advantage for Dash. The team has slowly been releasing the code in batches and should be completed at the end of this month, according to Nathan Marley, Deputy CTO of Dash Core Group.

This now totals 51 repositories that Dash has made open-source and available to the public, according to Agnew Pickens who has been compiling code repository statistics. This marks significant progress of advancing Dash Evolution towards being ready for consumer use.

Taking time to properly evolve cryptocurrency

The Dash Core Group has received a lot of criticism for missing Evolution release deadlines and for the length of time of the release. However, the context is that Evolution intends to evolve cryptocurrency usability and thus is taking a significant time to get right. Part of the delay was caused by underestimating the time to actually develop the vision that Dash creator, Evan Duffield, had laid out, which Dash Core Group’s CTO Bob Carroll previously highlighted.

“The real work began as detailed designs were created along with working code and corresponding DIPs. It wasn’t until that time, that we knew the real complexity of the effort. Challenges to building Evolution were more complicated than anyone could have reasonably estimated along with the initial vision.”

Many have also criticized Dash’s approach to developing Evolution in private, but this was done to ensure the code was developed well enough before being made open-source to provide the most consumer value and ensure Dash still had a competitive advantage once the code was free for anyone to use. Additionally, due to this strategy, many have wrongly classified Dash as not having an active development team since their study methodology simply looked at public GitHub repositories. This wrongly skewed the data against Dash since, at the time, many of Dash’s repositories were still private or were released and modified in batches to increase efficiency. Looking at past comments and history, such as this comment from Bob Carroll, Dash has followed through on its promises to make the code public and thus it is a positive sign that Dash will continue to deliver on its promises.

“Trying to measure progress through GitHub commits is not an effective method. We will eventually share the amount of effort that went into the building of Evolution, which will be tallied in man-years. For visibility, all of the foundational elements for Evolution, including the entire 0.13 release, are in public C++ repositories. Additional elements such as a Layer 2 protocol, the decentralized API, and the decentralized data storage component are written in Javascript and will be made public soon.”

Dash has been putting in quality time to ensure the code that it releases, even as open-source and long before a network release, is up to par to meet the quality that Dash supporters expect.

How Dash Evolution is going to change cryptocurrency

Dash’s founder recognized that many cryptocurrencies had amazing technologies, but they lacked consumer usability that would take it to the next status level of money. Thus, he thought of Evolution so Dash would not only have the infrastructure to super fast, super inexpensive, and super secure peer-to-peer digital money transfers, but also be easy and fun to use for everyday consumers.

Evolution intends to do this through improvements like Blockchain Usernames and contact lists so consumers can deal with easily recognizable names rather than computer-like alphanumeric strings. There is also going to be infrastructure set up for decentralized apps (DApps) to enable a community to form that will build out decentralized programs that will help individuals live more fun and efficient lives. DApps have been seen on other blockchains, but Dash has the opportunity to provide even more value since it is already being used as money at merchants around the world. Consumers on other DApp platforms have to worry about switching to a usable coin when doing tasks outside the platform. Despite delays and criticisms, Dash is advancing closer to the release of Evolution and the release of more code repositories is yet another positive sign.