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After a long period without public updates, Dash Labs, the research and development project headed up by Dash’s founder Evan Duffield, has broken the silence with an exclusive interview with Dash Force News. Tito Rios, Senior Data Structures Developer and Analyst for Dash Labs, outlined the group’s project next scheduled for release: the Dash Labs Data Collection Protocol. The Protocol, due for a beta release at the end of Q1 2019, will serve as a decentralized platform for submitting academic research for peer review, as well as serve as a marketplace for acquiring access to research by universities and companies. The project aims to decentralize the academic research field and provide a streamlined and cost-effective way of accessing said research, while using Dash for transactions on the platform.

After the open house meetup for the new Dash Core offices in Scottsdale, Arizona in spring of 2017, Duffield stepped down from the Core team leadership to head up a separate project, Dash Labs. Duffield began hiring staff summer of last year, and initially focused on research projects such as custom open-source masternode hardware and GPU accelerator research.

A laser-targeted use case for Dash in an industry that needs it

The Dash Labs Data Collection Protocol has the potential to revolutionize the academic research industry, which suffers from centralization and inefficiencies with major academic journals charging a hefty premium to submit research and access papers and studies. Dash Labs intends to leverage academic contacts to jump start use of the Protocol by academics to decentralize the process and allow freer and more inexpensive access to both submitting research for review and accessing the research on the consumer end. By using Dash exclusively on the platform, Dash can transition from speculative value to heavy use in a niche industry, where users otherwise completely uninterested in cryptocurrency or speculating on its price nonetheless buy and use Dash because of the opportunities it opens up in the academic field. Because of this, Dash Labs hopes the project will contribute significantly to Dash’s value and use as a currency.