Shielded transactions are live on the Dash Evolution mainnet, representing the most significant privacy overhaul in our 12+ years of providing confidential payments to users.
Dash's 12-Year Privacy Commitment
Since our founding in 2014, we've remained committed to solving all the problems preventing decentralized digital cash from becoming mainstream. The first challenge: let users keep their financial activity confidential.
We implemented a decentralized, integrated CoinJoin feature as one of the earliest and most robust privacy features on the market. We've continually improved it over the years, and Dash stands as the oldest cryptocurrency project with explicit built-in privacy features.
Since then we've focused on solving many of the other issues plaguing cryptocurrency: instant settlement, security, governance, self-funding, and ease of use. This year, it was finally time to turn our attention back to privacy.
The February-to-July Sprint
In early February, our developers scoped out a major overhaul: adding zero-knowledge privacy based on Zcash's Orchard technology to our Evolution network.
Orchard is at present the very top-of-the-line privacy tech in cryptocurrency. Based on the Halo 2 proving system, Orchard is highly efficient and has no need for a trusted setup, unlike previous iterations of the shielded protocol.
Over the five months from February to July, our developers worked day and night and not only made great progress on this massive technical overhaul, not only got a working implementation on testnet, but fully shipped a rigorously-tested mainnet release. Dash went from no shielded transactions to shielded transactions on mainnet in five months.
How Dash's Shielded Transactions Are Different
Despite essentially adopting Zcash's privacy tech, Dash's approach differs in quite a few very important ways.
First, and most importantly, we implemented the version of Orchard without a known inflation bug. The previous version contained a bug which could be exploited to undetectably inflate Zcash's supply. We fixed that before deploying to mainnet.
Second, because this lives on Dash's Evolution chain, transactions are settled significantly faster. We can achieve roughly one-second permanent, deterministic settlement. Contrast this with several-minute (or longer) probabilistic, non-permanent, optimistic settlement. Third, thanks to Dash's indexed hierarchical data structures, an end user can sync and load encrypted notes much faster than in other implementations. Often it takes hours to sync a wallet from scratch. Dash can do it in about 20 seconds.
Additionally, we will be rolling out shielded token functionality in the near future, so users can issue and use all manner of assets under the strongest confidentiality. There are many other differences and nuances in our privacy implementation and its roadmap, but theses are some of the highlights. To try it out,
(shielded support coming soon), or the third party
.