The Dash Core Group, the US-incorporated company leading the development of the peer-to-peer payment platform and cryptocurrency Dash, has filed a provisional patent relating to its upcoming platform called Evolution, expected to launch in Alpha in H2 2018.

The patent deals with the registration and storage of metadata relating to blockchain-based user accounts on the Evolution platform. The group said it filed the patent for defensive purposes and will freely license its innovations to the public subject to terms and conditions of an accompanying licensing policy.

“Similar to how Tesla has ‘open sourced’ their electric automotive tech patents, we felt that it was worth applying for a minimal level of protection for our patent. Utilizing a set of licensing criteria similar to Tesla’s ‘Good Faith’ clause with its open patents, we can now freely license the patent to the public, while ensuring that no one co-opts the technology for use that contradicts the Dash network’s long-term goals of mass adoption,” Dash Core CEO Ryan Taylor told CoinJournal.

In a bid to boost the electric car industry, Tesla CEO Elon Musk vowed in 2014 that the company would not sue when other companies use its patents so long that these companies are “acting in good faith.”

This includes not asserting any patent or other intellectual property right for the use of technologies relating to electric vehicles or related equipment, not challenging any Tesla patent, and not marketing or selling any knock-off product, according to Tesla’s Patent Pledge.

“Dash Core Group is protecting the technology and all its potential users or developers from malicious actors that could patent the technology themselves to try to extract undue revenue or prevent others from using it,” Taylor said.

“We think the community will understand and appreciate the logic, and we see it as another major step toward enhancing the professionalism of the entire digital currency industry, as well as protection for what we envisage as a game-changing technology like Evolution.”

The patent, which lists as inventors the Dash developers Evan Duffield, Andy Freer, Timothy Flynn, Nathan Marley, Darren Tapp, Alex Werner and Will Wray, is for an overlay on the existing Dash protocol. The new overlay enables blockchain-based user accounts, as well as storage of metadata and the rules that govern interactions between accounts, while preserving the decentralization of the Dash network.

The patent itself is not public record currently, though it will become publicly available within 18 months after a non-provisional patent is filed.

The much-anticipated Evolution platform promises to introduce major improvements and several important developments, which Dash Core will share in the weeks and months ahead. “We’ll be announcing specific features as the rollout progresses,” Taylor said, adding that the patent filed in the previous weeks was “a good primer for what to expect.”

Notably, the new technologies to be released will allow developers to build their own decentralized application protocols on top of Dash, making it possible to introduce functionalities and features such as user accounts, password recovery, recurrent payments, among other things.

“Such a leap forward will be done thanks to data contracts that Dash has developed. These differ from smart contracts in that the computation is done at the client level instead of the network, but the data and relations are still validated in the blockchain,” Taylor explained.

While this will bring in additional possibilities for developers, the goal remains nevertheless to make Dash more accessible to a much broader audience.

“At a high-level Evolution will make Dash the industry’s first decentralized payments platform that can be used by the average user,” Taylor said.