Developers

Dash Core has published an extensive Developer Guide to help new developers get started with the Dash code base, and as a reference for experienced developers. This guide can be leveraged to quickly and efficiently integrate external applications with the Dash ecosystem. Anyone can contribute to the guide by submitting an issue or pull request on GitHub. The documentation is available at: https://dash-docs.github.io/en/

The Dash Core Team also maintains the Dash Roadmap, which sets out delivery milestones for future releases of Dash and includes specific technical details describing how the development team plans to realise each challenge. The Dash Roadmap is complemented by the Dash Improvement Proposals, which contain detailed technical explanations of proposed changes to the Dash protocol itself.

The remaining sections available below describe practical steps to carry out common development tasks in Dash.

Sporks

A multi-phased fork, colloquially known as a “spork”, is a mechanism unique to Dash used to safely deploy new features to the network through network-level variables to avoid the risk of unintended network forking during upgrades. It can also be used to disable certain features if a security vulnerability is discovered - see here for a brief introduction to sporks. This documentation describes the meaning of each spork currently existing on the network, and how to check their respective statuses.

Spork functions

Sporks are set using integer values. Many sporks may be set to a particular epoch datetime (number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970) to specify the time at which they will active. Enabled sporks are set to 0 (seconds until activation). This function is often used to set a spork enable date so far in the future that it is effectively disabled until changed. The following sporks currently exist on the network and serve functions as described below:

SPORK_2_INSTANTSEND_ENABLED
Governs the ability of Dash clients to use InstantSend functionality.
SPORK_3_INSTANTSEND_BLOCK_FILTERING
If enabled, masternodes will reject blocks containing transactions in conflict with locked but unconfirmed InstantSend transactions.
SPORK_5_INSTANTSEND_MAX_VALUE
Enforces the maximum value in Dash that can be included in an InstantSend transaction.
SPORK_6_NEW_SIGS
Enables a new signature format for Dash-specific network messages introduced in Dash 12.3. For more information, see here and here.
SPORK_8_MASTERNODE_PAYMENT_ENFORCEMENT
If enabled, miners must pay 50% of the block reward to a masternode currently pending selection or the block will be considered invalid.
SPORK_9_SUPERBLOCKS_ENABLED
If enabled, superblocks are verified and issued to pay proposal winners.
SPORK_10_MASTERNODE_PAY_UPDATED_NODES
Controls whether masternodes running an older protocol version are considered eligible for payment. This can be used as an incentive to encourage masternodes to update.
SPORK_12_RECONSIDER_BLOCKS
Forces reindex of a specified number of blocks to recover from unintentional network forks.
SPORK_13_OLD_SUPERBLOCK_FLAG
Deprecated. No network function since block 614820.
SPORK_14_REQUIRE_SENTINEL_FLAG
Toggles whether masternodes with status are eligible for payment if status is WATCHDOG_EXPIRED, i.e. Sentinel is not running properly.
SPORK_15_DETERMINISTIC_MNS_ENABLED
Controls whether deterministic masternodes are required. When activated, the legacy masternode list logic will no longer run and non-updated masternodes will not be eligible for payment.
SPORK_16_INSTANTSEND_AUTOLOCKS
Enables automatic transaction locking for transactions with less than a specified number of inputs, and removes the legacy InstantSend fee. Allows any node to request the transaction lock, not just the sending node.
SPORK_17_QUORUM_DKG_ENABLED
Enables the DKG process to create LLMQ quorums. This spork will be turned on once 80% masternodes are upgraded to v0.14, which will enable DKG and DKG-based PoSe.
SPORK_19_CHAINLOCKS_ENABLED
Enables ChainLocks, a mechanism of preventing the risk to payments introduced by blockchain reorganization events. ChainLocks are described in DIP0008 ChainLocks.
SPORK_20_INSTANTSEND_LLMQ_BASED
When enabled, legacy InstantSend is superseded by LLMQ-based InstantSend, as described in DIP0010 LLMQ-based InstantSend.

Viewing spork status

The spork show and spork active commands issued in the debug window (or from dash-cli on a masternode) allow you to interact with sporks. You can open the debug window by selecting Tools > Debug console.

../_images/dashcore-sporks.png

spork show and spork active output in the Dash Core debug console

Version History

Full release notes and the version history of Dash are available here: