Link copied The recent major upgrade, v19, for the privacy-focused digital currency Dash experienced a hiccup, as announced by CTO Samuel Westrich through a tweet on the morning of May 21. The Dash blockchain experienced a pause during the activation process of this much-anticipated update. However, a swift response from the Dash team led to the release of a corrective v19.1.0 patch roughly 13 hours later.
While the blockchain was offline, Dash developers issued a cautionary note. This downtime affected Dash's distinct security features, namely ChainLocked and InstantSend.
During the period of blockchain inactivity, Binance, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, put a temporary hold on distributing Dash mining rewards.
The v19 update, revealed on April 10, aimed to enhance security measures by incorporating BLS signatures. It also intended to introduce superior masternode execution and wallet upgrades, along with several other modifications, in anticipation of the Dash Platform's introduction to the mainnet. Users were further recommended against downgrading to avoid additional complications.
The Dash Core forms the underlying infrastructure for Dash's privacy-focused digital currency, which branched out from Litecoin in 2014. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asserted in their April allegations against Bittrex that Dash coin qualifies as a security.
The term 'hard fork' might bring to mind a scene from a restaurant, but it's a crucial tech term with significant implications. Picture a busy highway that suddenly splits into two separate roads. A hard fork in a blockchain network works similarly. It's a pivotal moment where the existing blockchain splits into two parallel chains, each following a different set of rules. The change is 'hard' because it's not backward-compatible. This means all network participants must update their systems to the new rules to continue participating. In essence, a hard fork is like a software upgrade that's so significant, it creates a whole new parallel universe in the blockchain world.
