As the Dash project celebrates its “second birthday”, the team behind the cryptocurrency has secured the trademark rights of the Dash Foundation and are proposing an increase of the protocol’s block size limit to 2 MB.

Evan Duffield, Dash’s lead developer, said:

We are also happy to announce the legal procedures have concluded and we and our service providers can safely use the brand Dash in everything that relates to virtual currencies. With this Dash becomes one of the few cryptocurrency projects with well-defined trademark rights.

Duffield thanked Foundation members for their financial support. The funding made it possible for the Dash Foundation to afford the required legal work. The resolution of the trademark issue means the name of the organization can be changed from the Darkcoin Foundation to the Dash Foundation.

Duffiled also proposed to the Dash community an increase in the platform’s block size limitation to 2MB to prepare for the future growth of the network. He asked for Dash nodes to vote using the network’s decentralized governance system to ensure the community was behind the increase.

While block size debate in the Bitcoin community has resulted in no progress in updating the Bitcoin network, the members of Dash Foundation appear to be unified behind scalability of Dash. Duffield noted:

With the current 1MB block size limit we have approximately 4x the capacity of the Bitcoin project in transactions per second capability, due to the 2.5 minute block spacing and a current 1MB blocksize. With our current limitations our network could theoretically allow nearly 28 transactions per second. We propose a change to a 2MB block size limitation, allowing up to 56 transactions per second. This will allow the currency to grow to approximately 8x the current transactional capacity of the Bitcoin project. It is important to plan for the long term success of the network and future adoption, by making this change we will be ready to scale and also give ourselves ample time to continue research and development to look for additional ways to improve efficiencies of the network.

Duffield indicated that raising the block size limit is not a centralization concern for the Dash network as it relies on a “full node incentive model.” As the volume and usage rise on the Dash network, the profits of the masternode network will also increase, creating excess funding to process the extra bandwidth without losing decentralization.

Duffield admitted there were already security concerns with 1MB blocks.

To implement 2mb blocks and prepare for Evolution, we must take care of some security concerns as well. There is a concern even with 1MB blocks that an attacker could add a transaction that takes 30 seconds to process, with 2MB blocks it’s actually possible to add a 10 minute script to process. To close these attack vectors there will be no more “ completely free” transactions in blocks, instead we will use a flat fee per kb when adding transactions to the blockchain that should be negligible for normal usage. This can be done via the spork code, which can set system-wide variables in the code. Once set, all blocks will be subject to this limitation, otherwise will be rejected by the network.

In regard to determining if the proposal passes, more yes votes than no votes will be considered approval by the network as long as more than 33% of the network votes. If less than 33% of the network votes, that would be considered a denial of the block size increase proposal, according to Duffield.