July 29: Dash, a payments-focused cryptocurrency project, is launching the Evolution upgrade on July 29, described as “its most major upgrade” to date. According to the team: “Evolution is a new sidechain and data contract platform to enable indexed decentralized storage and decentralized applications. The first two of these, Dash Platform Name Service and DashPay, deliver a decentralized Venmo-style payment experience of usernames and contact lists. Looking forward, Dash aims to implement IBC compatibility, as well smart contracts to enable advanced privacy for tokens data and payments.” According to a blog post: “The Platform Chain is a sidechain that, as mentioned above, is run by EvoNodes, which also secure the legacy Dash chain. It uses the account-based model (single addresses have balances), as opposed to the UTXO model (multiple addresses hold coins, or UTXOs) of the Core chain. It uses a heavily-modified derivative of Tendermint (Cosmos) consensus called Tenderdash. The main differences between Tenderdash and Tendermint are that Dash’s version has same-block execution, meaning you don’t have to wait for the next block after writing new data in order to query it.”
