According to Dash Core Group CEO Ryan Taylor, Dash is looking into borrowing from Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash scaling research for block propagation techniques.
During a recent interview with Abra CEO Bill Barhydt on the Money 3.0 podcast, Taylor mentioned that Dash Core developers were looking at the technology in the rest of the cryptocurrency space to keep up to date with the latest innovations to potential adopt for Dash. One of the top areas for research was in on-chain scaling methods, particularly how nodes propagate blocks around the network:
“[A key interest] area is honesty block propagation technologies. We want to be able to scale massively and there are some real innovations that are happening around block propagation that if you speed up block propagation the economics for the minor changes, absolutely. They can include more transactions with lower fees and still be assured that their block will be accepted by the network. And so we’ve done quite a bit of research in that area ourselves and we’ve also looked at what’s being done with Bitcoin Cash and some of the other chains that are looking more towards scaling.”
A major bottleneck in scaling blockchain networks is block propagation, or the ability of all nodes on the network to efficiently receive and view a block full of transactions. While some improvements can be made in hardware running the nodes in question, most optimizations are done at the software level. Research from Arizona State University has shown that Dash can easily scale to handle 10MB blocks (equivalent to 40MB on the Bitcoin network due to faster block times) for a transaction volume of over half that which PayPal currently processes. Scaling researcher Dr. Darren Tapp has written for Dash News outlining the various block propagation techniques and challenges, and believes that Dash can easily scale well past what has already been tested in current research.
Taylor previously referred to Dash’s plan for massive on-chain scaling, saying that Dash is not looking into importing features from Bitcoin scaling necessary for the Lightning Network and other off-chain transaction solutions.
Dash is researching technologies to improve areas beyond scaling
In addition to Bitcoin scaling research and block propagation, Dash is also looking into other areas for improvement, including in privacy functionality, according to Taylor:
“I think that there are some really interesting things that continue to happen with privacy that are increasingly scalable and don’t impact the user experience quite as much as some of the early technologies did. And so I think that’s an area where we’re to be exploring it quite a bit.”
Arizona State University is presently conducting research into applying zero-knowledge proofs, similar to the technology employed by Zcash and other similar projects, to Dash, in particular to securing user data on the upcoming Dash Platform.
