Dispatch Dev Update 8 — Mainnet Launch

What to expect when you’re expecting (a Mainnet)

It’s a protocol!

The time has finally come! It’s been quite the journey since our first Developer Update back in January, but we couldn’t be happier or more excited for the imminent launch of the Dispatch Main Network.

In this article, I’ll cover exactly what our Mainnet launch looks like from a nerd’s perspective 🤓

Don’t feel like reading? Here’s the cliffs-notes

The TLDR

🤓 We’re launching the Mainnet specifically for our (badass) community of Dapp developers to go “live” with their projects

💻 We’re continuing to develop new features/functionality post-Mainnet launch

⛓ To ensure the stability/security of the network, Dispatch will control all of the Delegates at launch before turning over the validator positions to the community

📱 This will be a developer-facing launch of the protocol while we fine-tune the front-end products (Mobile Wallet, Network Scanner, etc.) for the general public

🙈 Zero-Knowledge Analytics MVP is the top priority post-Mainnet

In code we trust

A Mainnet by Developers, for Developers

A software project is never truly finished. There’s always one more feature that could be added or some algorithm that could be optimized. While we believe the feature set we’re launching with is well beyond that of an MVP, the Dispatch protocol will continue to evolve post-launch.

Those of you who have been following our Dev Updates since the beginning know we have a ton of killer features, like:

🤝 DAPoS consensus algorithm for byzantine fault-tolerant consensus

📡 HTTP API for easy access to the network

📑 Backwards-compatibility with EVM/Solidity smart-contracts

⏱ Rate-limiting of transactions to eliminate transaction fees

🔬 So much more

However there’s still a lot of functionality we want to put in. For example:

📚 Bookkeepers

🗳 Delegate elections

🙈 Zero-Knowledge Analytics

📦 Storage Orderbook

🏎 Consensus Optimizations

🔒 SSL support for Dapps

No decentralization without representation

The Do’s and Don’ts of Launching a Delegated Network

Delegated networks provide the scalability of a centralized system with the security of a decentralized system that has one major risk: collusion.

So that means we will not have a hand in selecting the initial pool of Delegates, and we especially won’t put them all in a group chat to talk about whether or not to print more tokens for themselves.

Our plan is instead to launch the network with full control over the 5 Delegates and 1 seed node. When we believe the network is stable, we will flip the switch on Delegate elections. The community will then be able to elect as many Delegates from the community as they believe is safe and appropriate.

Piloting a startup is kind of like driving a car with no windows

Post-Mainnet Development

After we launch the Mainnet, which is primarily focused on developers, we’ll be shifting our attention more to the usability of the network. This means we’ll be upgrading our Mobile Wallet, Network Scanner, and other tools to interface with the protocol.

But don’t think we’re stopping the innovation train just yet 🚂 We’ve been exploring the idea of Distributed Data Analysis to really get the value out of all that data stored in the Dispatch Artifact Network (DAN). So one of our top priorities post-Mainnet is to ship an MVP of Zero-Knowledge Analytics. This is some top tier cryptographic stuff involving a combination of zero-knowledge proofs, Homomorphic encryption, and Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), so if you’ve got any experience/interest in this level of privacy tech, please join the conversation over in Discord!

Big brains hidden behind pretty faces

Launch and Learn Event

Finally, we hosted an event on Thursday, December 6 in San Francisco. We had speakers from Dispatch (obviously), Andra Capital, Deloitte, 500 Startups, the Republic Crypto as they reviewed 2018 and discussed the what to watch in 2019. Watch replay now.