Welcome!

This proposal is for a regular minimum development budget for Dash’s privacy overhaul (CT) to supplement donations and any future grants in order to keep development advancing.

CT upgrade recap

Last April, the Dash network voted to implement Confidential Transactions (CT) at the protocol level. This will radically improve the privacy of regular Dash transactions by hiding amounts and address balances. Unlike CoinJoin, which is an interactive process and is much more challenging to integrate into wallets (and therefore is only in very few Dash wallets), CT will be much easier to integrate. This will be optional, and users, exchanges, etc. can still choose to keep funds in transparent addresses.

A primary motivation for CT is to overhaul our existing CoinJoin functionality. By keeping amounts and balances hidden, we will no longer need to break coins into many denominations and mix each denomination 4-16 times, and instead can mix the entire balance 1-4 times. This offers much better privacy, but also significantly expedites the mixing process, going from hours to potentially minutes or even seconds. Finally, the data load on the network will be significantly reduced over heavy legacy CoinJoin usage, improving the scalability of Dash’s privacy.

Adding CT will make Dash the most private cryptocurrency with a transparent blockchain, and without any special new considerations for exchanges and so on. It will also be the only private cryptocurrency with always-instant transactions (even private coins like Firo cannot be sent immediately after receiving without a confirmation).

Read the full CT decision proposal here.

Why do we need DAO funding?

We need to keep development progressing while we are waiting for additional external funding from grant organizations.

Power Up Privacy (PUP) funded the CT integration $K, which mostly paid for the Dash Improvement Proposal (DIP), and agreed to fund the entirety of the integration, estimated to be somewhere around $200k. This was initiated in August of last year. However, and the process of reviewing changes to the DIP from the Core team took several months, with a month more to approve the decision proposal. During this time PUP went on break and became unresponsive. According to their other former grant recipients this is fairly normal behavior for them. However, we can’t afford to simply wait to continue development if and when PUP reappears and sends an additional grant.

In the meantime, I have begun applying to various grant programs for funding, including a Kraken development grant and a grant from the Oxen Privacy Foundation. We are also pursuing the creation of a Dash fund through MAGIC Grants, which would give us a nonprofit legal entity for tax deductible donations to advance Dash’s privacy. Even if awarded, however, these grants will take time. Additionally, many of these nonprofits only award funding to legal entities and pay to contractors who have undergone KYC, and our principal developer, Duke Leto, will only be paid on a pseudonymous basis, and as such could only be paid through DAO, donation, or PUP funds.

Even after the initial CT integration is completed, there is still much more work to be done: dev tools, integrations, security audits, research, and more, not to mention research and development for privacy on the Evolution platform. There is essentially no risk of over-allocating funds even in the case of a large generous grant, as everything can be used to improve Dash’s privacy at the protocol level, but also to build out tools, integrations into third-party wallets, and so on.

Ask

The monthly ask for this proposal is 200 Dash. This should be able to sustain consistent part-time development to keep the CT integration advancing. The higher the value of this proposal, as well as the more we receive in donations and grants, the faster we will be able to work.

Duke has agreed to work on a more flexible basis, so if we receive less funding one particular month, he will simply schedule fewer hours for the upcoming month.

Donation address

Below is the donation address (same as this proposal address):
https://blockchair.com/dash/address/XesuLpAE8NuMuFH2bvLgcKQUiWvJBiXpKo?from=dash

I have already donated 206 Dash of my own funds to advance CT on Dash, and will continue to do so regularly, regardless of whether or not this proposal is funded. I encourage others to do the same as well. Once again, more funding equals faster development and delivery.