Following the approval of the
EXPEDITE-60-20-20-REALLOCATION proposal, some features that support the release of Platform will not be activated as part of v20.0. Instead, Platform activation will align with the v21.0 release.
This v20 update feels a bit like 1 stap forward and 2 steps backward to me, as important Platform features that were suppose to activate through v20 are now delayed and put into v21. While the main feature of v21 : Trustless Masternode Shares has been postponed (feels like postponed indefinetely) to a later major release.
Two reasons are provided on Github for this :
https://github.com/dashpay/dash/pull/5642
- Having a hard fork and a spork is supposedly confusing for Dash users, so the idea emerged to just spread this out over two hard forks through two major releases (v20 & v21). This is strange to read for me as DCG did plenty of hard fork & spork activation in the past through one single major release. Dash users & MNO's are used to hard fork activation (modified bip9 hard fork requiring miner support) in combination with spork activation (needing masternodes support).
- Testing of certain Platform features in v20 (Asset Unlock transactions for example) were not started, eventhough devs reserved full two months for testing v20 on Testnet. Why devs could not start the testing of the Asset Unlock transactions on Testnet i do not know, i suspect having a v20 update so full of features (many not essential to a Platform release on Mainnet) may have caused devs to run simply out of time here.
By the way, the above was just discussed between devs on Github, it was never discussed in the Expedite-60-20-20-Reallocation thread with MNO's on Dash Central.
What this means for MNO & Evonode owners :
This will delay Evonodes from getting access to both L1 and L2 and delay Evonodes from receiving both a portion of the block rewards (L1) & Credits (L2). The distribution of a portion of the masternode blockrewards towards Credits in a Creditpool is also getting delayed to v21.
This most likely means less incentivize for masternode owners to convert their Masternodes to Evonodes right now. They may as well wait for v21 (or later versions .. who knows), before setting up an Evonode. Number of Evonodes on Mainnet are still very low (85), i do not expect this to change now v20 has been split in two parts (v20 and v21).
Dash users / Masternode owners / Evonode owners will first have to wait for the hard fork process to finalize with v20, and then wait for another hard fork process to finalize with v21, before having any chance of seeing Platform released on Mainnet. Both updates will need miner support due to the hard forks. I reckon this could take 6 months (2 months to finalize the hard fork in v20 and 4 months to release & finalize the hard fork in v21). Could even be longer.
At least this v20 update is out on Mainnet now, but i can't say i am that thrilled about witnessing yet another delay with regards to a Platform release to Mainnet (which will now need a Dash Core v21 first). Also i do not understand why devs are so much deviating from using hard fork + spork to now using several hard forks, spread over multiple major releases. This is bound to delay the Platform release and other major releases in the future and when something goes wrong, there is no reset to a previous safe state possible (which sporks do offer). I hope devs will keep the features in v21 to a bare minimum, so that v21 can be released soon. But to be honest, i have little faith that they will.
