Labeling it “its largest software upgrade ever”, Dash has released version 12.1, codenamed Sentinel, today. The anticipated update sets to path a wider redesign of Dash in its advent toward unveiling ‘Evolution’ a decentralized payments system and marketplace that Dash says will compete with the likes of PayPal and Venmo.

The latest network upgrade, Dash adds, will feature improvements to backend protocols, voting functions and privacy features and governance.

Ryan Taylor, director of finance at Dash stated:

We vastly improved the speed of our end user privacy features, improved access to information on the network’s budget and voting system, and created a much more stable and robust governance system that enables changes to network without requiring additional software upgrades.

The latest release will also feature a decentralized programmable database solution, enabling updates through a programmable interface.

Toward Evolution

Sentinel is a necessary upgrade toward establishing Evolution, a payments system that offers no consumer fees for its instant transactions, “near-free” merchant fees in an integrated marketplace and interest bearing accounts accessible on a bank-like user interface. Fundamentally, it’s akin to the user-features offered by PayPal and Venmo but with “far more perks” according to the open-source project.

Dash founder Evan Duffield stated:

Evolution will profoundly change the user experience and expand the cryptocurrency market to users…It’s my belief that digital currencies will never be the same after Evolution, in the same way we would never consider going back to a text-only internet.

The latest upgraded software version was put to test by prominent masternode host and blockchain governance firm Node40 for several months prior to its release.

The cryptocurrency has risen in value ever since the announcement of Sentinel, first revealed on January 2 this year. Dash breached the $100 million milestone for market capitalization the following day. This past weekend, Dash’s market cap reached an all-time high of $125 million.

Around a similar time last year, Dash revealed another major software upgrade in doubling its blocksize from 1MB to 2MB following a 24-hour voting process.

Image from Shutterstock. Chart from CoinmarketCap.