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Community Q&A - Q3 2020 Summary Call

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Dash Core Group
Dash Support Group
This thread lists questions and answers from the DCG Q3 2020 Summary Call. The first posts contain transcribed answers from the call, and remaining questions will be collected and posted here over the course of the week. Questions are as follows:
  1. Q: With the recent github take-downs of applications like youtube-dl, it's only a matter of time that coin mixing technology - e.g. Dash Desktop Wallet - is also taken down. I'm assuming Dash Core has a backup plan but it seems to me Dash Platform is the perfect opportunity to Eat Your Own Dog Food by moving all development code and docs to Dash Platform. This would, of course, be extremely valuable, not just to dash but to many other open source projects facing a similar dilemma. To what extent has this been discussed and prioritized?

    A (Bob): I think there's a few aspects of this. One is: there is a reality as far as the amount of censorship that could take place in our community, and obviously I think that's what we're all striving to deliver solutions for. The specifics around source code and and documentation, where that resides, and the opportunity to put that into a decentralized environment, is a great opportunity. It has been discussed, but not at great levels internally. I think this also beckons the question too, of what the purpose of platform is, and the purpose of DCG and our development of the platform, and then the proliferation and the use of platform throughout the community. So when I look at this question, I would have to first say, would it be the top priority for DCG to take on? To just use it, to build a source code repository system and decentralized environment? That is a great use case and the question of whether or not DCG takes on those specific use cases or not is a question of where we spend our time and our money. At this point in time it's not on our priority list to do that. However, I think the comment that goes back to the community as a whole is who is going to do that? Because the use case is perfectly aligned. In our situation, I don't think it's necessarily DCG eating DCG's dog food. It's the Dash community dog food, and so I'd look to the community to prioritize that and look at it as a real opportunity. Obviously we have backups if there were immediate issues and concerns. But I think this is more long-term vision and a great use case, so appreciate you bringing it up on a call like this. It opens it up and exposes it to the whole community of developers who may be listening, who may find it more aligned with what they want to accomplish.

  2. Q: Bob: Will you merge the two GitHub orgs (dashpay & dashevo)?
    Q: Another simple adjustment is modifying github structure so external crypto github analytics show correct results. I heard that plan from DCG devs, but when will it be done?


    A (Bob): I think this is important to be handled together. We have been doing a pretty in-depth analysis of the state of our repositories, specifically the two organizations dashpay and dashevo at the org level, as well as the repos that exist within them. I think there are differing opinions that still need to be worked out on the benefits and the complexities of merging the two. The analytics though, is probably our biggest driving force. When we've had conversations (and i'm leading those at this point in time between about merging the two organizations) it has not been for simplicity of "gee, it would be nice if we only had one org". It's just not about simplicity. It is about business needs and ensuring that we're viewed in the most favorable manner.

    However, it's not just about orgs and whether or not we're in one org or another, and we're looking at stats off of that. Much of it actually has to do with the way our developers do work, what branches we do the work in, and how those are are merged back in. The organizations that actually build the analytics and and drive those have different algorithms that they use to look at. So part of the decision making process is going to be some further research to find out what algorithms they're looking at, what they're really doing, and seeing if either their algorithms could be modified to adjust to how we develop and deploy code, or vice versa, how we could modify some of our procedures to be more favorable. Because the amount of work that we do is not accurately reflected in the companies that mine that data. So I'm owning that right now. Will we merge the two orgs? I don't have an answer on that. The proposal is yes, we would, and so I'm looking for reasons why we would not at this point in time. And part of that might just be the the level of effort it takes for the house cleaning to to do so. But the main goal there is to have accurate metrics on the amount of contributions that we have in our repos.

  3. Q: Can the Dash Platform team be scaled up with more devs? Community said they would support DCG asking for more funds from the treasury (than currently) for development.

    A (Bob): I'll answer the human resource side of this, and obviously there's a financial side that has to do with how much we request from the network each month that I won't touch on, because that has more Glenn written on it. Can the team be scaled up? Yes it can. There are points where there's diminishing returns on the size of development teams, and they need to be broken into multiple components: somebody looking after one aspect, another team looking after another. At this point in time we've kept the team holistically together. As we move into a new year and we get platform out on mainnet and we start looking at possibly more use cases, e.g. some things at the protocol level, we may have opportunities to do that. But you wouldn't want to scale it up too much is really what I'm saying right now. However, we have had a need to scale it up just to get through the amount of work that we've committed to. So, over the last quarter, we have reached out and pulled in two experts from the community outside of DCG to assist with our efforts, and they've been invaluable in that. I think, as I mentioned earlier on some slides, we've had individuals from both the core team as well as the mobile team jump in and help out, participate on calls, reviewing designs, making sure that technical feasibility is accurate and correct. So that has been really helpful. If the community says they would support it, then I guess the question is back on us: do we ask for more of that support as we look at future compensation proposals? That will be something I'm sure Glenn will look at and consider. At this point in time, we are constrained by the amount of finances that we have, and that's that is a limiting factor on our team size right now. However, I don't feel like we're underfunded for the team. We've got a strong core group of developers on the Dash Platform team today, but we could scale up a bit more.

    A (Ryan): I'll answer the question too, from the financial end of things. We have restricted ourselves to 60% of the available funding to ensure that we do have a robust community outside of Dash Core Group. Given that we feel like we can deliver on what we're committed to right now, we don't have any immediate plans to expand the ask. It is something we could do, especially if the proposal system becomes more flexible and it wouldn't necessarily have the effect of choking out other existing teams to the point that our ecosystem itself suffers. If we ever do put up a proposal like that, it would be a separate proposal. We would not lump it in with our existing ask. That would allow the network to make a discrete decision about the incremental. We've communicated that in the past, that remains the case. We would follow that type of a process if we ever felt it was was necessary to do.

  4. Q: Scaling questions:
    - What is the maximum number of transactions that Dash can currently process reliably?
    - What are the maximum number of transactions that were demonstrated that Dash could handle per second if we wanted to e.g. increasing the block size?
    - Is there a scaling issue with Dash?
    - How does Dash compare to Visa in terms of transactions per second?
    - What actual demonstrable evidence can we use to prove that Dash is a scalable solution and what number of transactions per second can we scale to?
    Other bitcoin-based coins such as BSV claim they can scale up to millions of transactions per second by simply increasing the block size to Gigabyte blocks. If BSV can do this why can't Dash?
    Q: Should we double the block size in preparation for platform release?


    A (Ryan): There were other questions submitted around how much can it scale, do we know how much it can scale, do we know the upper limits, etc? The answer to all of these questions is: yes, you can scale up to a very large block size. The issue that you run into outside of a laboratory is that block sizes, as they grow, take longer to propagate a network. So the trade-off is, yes you can cram more transactions into a block, however the stability of your blockchain, and the certainty over the chain tip, becomes less and less certain as you grow that. Even with a technology like ChainLocks, each node that is voting on the ChainLock has to actually see the block and evaluate it before they can vote on which chain is the correct one. There is a fundamental trade-off between block size and the stability of the network. Obviously stability of the network is important also. We have done work with ASU in the past that has identified where that stability begins to break down, and to what extent. It does seem to be at levels well in excess of what PayPal is able to process today, just to give you an idea of the scale, and that assumes no change to our infrastructure. I would argue that if Dash were being used as much as PayPal, chances are our market cap would be quite a bit higher than it is today. The payments to masternodes would be quite a bit higher than they are today, and therefore the quality of the infrastructure for a masternode hosting all of this would be substantially better hardware. If that were all to happen, how much better hardware could they afford and therefore how much beyond the current levels that were measured by ASU could the network extend without making changes to the protocol? The answer is we don't really know how all of that would play out in great detail. What we do know is we have a very long runway of growth in front of us before that would be an issue. It's not a focus to really figure this out, develop solutions for it... It's building for capacity, for demand that isn't there yet, and so we're more focused on developing features and developing our ecosystem so that the growth is there. As the growth begins to catch up with our capacity, that's something we can begin to look at more depth.

    As far as BSV's claims go: yes it is true, they could go to gigabyte-sized blocks. But they already have network instability in the way that they have some fairly deep reorganizations that have occurred on their network, six blocks or more. So there is that trade-off, and and what that means for practical purposes is you don't truly have blockchain certainty even with six confirmations. It means now you need to go to 12, or whatever. Making blocks more often doesn't really solve the problem either, because the instability just gets pushed into a different place. So you truly do need to develop new technologies to increase your scale. ChainLocks actually did that for Dash. There are other technologies you can look at, like sharding and so on, but again all of this is likely to be looked at further down the road when we've begun to reach the limits of our current capacity, or at least that is on the horizon or foreseeable in the immediate future. In the meantime, new technologies are being developed and could apply to our network at some point in the future too. So it's not an area that we focused on a great deal. Scaling is not an issue for Dash.

  5. Q: Does the DCG board have an annual process in place to evaluate their own performance and the performance/succession plan of the CEO, and is this presented to the DAO trust protectors?

    A (Ryan): I think this question should be directed at both DCG and the DAO trust protectors. To answer DCG's part: yes, we do have an annual performance review. We use a 360 review process, that means that subordinates rate their managers, managers rate their direct reports and there is peer reviews at individual team levels, or across the management team, or across board members. So we do go through that process. We're actually in the middle of going through that process right now, the teams are wrapping up their evaluations of each other and we will then begin to pull together that information into reports that will be shared with each of the employees and contractors, along with open-ended comments that people had the opportunity to provide.

    The manager will then sit down with each of the employees or contractors and review the report, as well as offer their perspective on what the report means, and compare their performance to the previous year. Where are places they've made improvements, where places that that might need work. So we have a very formal process in place that we go through on an annual basis in order to provide feedback on performance. The overwhelming response from our employees and contractors has been that it's a valuable process for them. They get a lot of high quality feedback out of it. They feel like they get a good picture of how others in the organization see them. They get to see how they see themselves in relation to that, and it leads to some very rich conversations, including about what do you want to do next? What's a good fit for you? How are the needs of the organization changing? So it's a very rich process, we get a lot of value out of it, the employees and contractors get a lot out of it, I get a lot out of it, and so we we do take that seriously. All of that is shared with DCG's board.

    The trust protectors have not been involved in that process. Typically, as representatives of shareholders, that type of information is not generally shared with shareholders. But if this is something they're interested in diving deep into and reviewing, I don't see any reason why we can't share information on the results of that at the executive level and get their input or feedback on it. But it is a very rigorous process.
 
  1. Q: Does Dash have a plan to offer a unique service which is best in class - beyond the payments field, which will soon be captured and controlled by central bank digital coins?

    A (Ryan): I think that there is a big caveat in the question itself, which is whether or not there is a population of people that are skeptical of central bank issued currency in general, whether it's in its digital form or not. To me, I think the answer to that is clearly that there is a market for that. Venezuela is a prime example of this, but it's far from the only example of a population of people that reside in countries in which they've had a horrific experience with central bank issued currencies. Clearly, the market exists for this type of thing. We are competing to provide a high quality solution there. In terms of our positioning, it does seem like Dash is carving out a strong niche within the payment space, and we continue to show growth quarter on quarter in terms of folks actually using it, we continue to make traction with moving upstream in Venezuela to larger retailers. It's proving quite valuable in the trading space, and we're getting a lot of interest from trading tools in terms of how Dash can be incorporated into trading ecosystems. Basically in summary, I think that there is a place for public supply-capped currency, that functions as currency, is instant and is decentralized, and not issued and controlled by a government. I really think that Dash is best in class within that use case. I do think there are some improvements we needed to make, I think that the store of value component was essential for us, and I'm glad to see that that is finally being adopted on the network. I hope that it has great impact on our ability to grow with the use cases that we're targeting.

  2. Q: Dash has been categorized as an “anonymity enhanced cryptocurrency” in a recent US DOJ report. Can DCG be proactive and write, or have DCG’s legal counsel write the Dept of Justice attorneys, each of which is named at the top of the report, and explain to the DOJ attorneys the nuances and differences of Dash - as compared to the paid mixers/other privacy coins.

    A (Glenn): Earlier on the call, Ernesto already touched upon this topic, but why don't we go ahead and dive into it in a little bit more detail here. As some background for people on the call, the US department of justice did publish a cryptocurrency framework several weeks ago. I've read the report and I can confirm it completely miscategorizes Dash as a private blockchain, as well as as an anonymity enhanced cryptocurrency. These statements are just simply factually inaccurate, so it's clear that our top priority is to get in front of the DOJ and to explain to them the fact that Dash's risk profile is actually lower than Bitcoin's, and that we're not a private blockchain. So far every single interaction we've had with regulators, where we were able to sit down with them and educate them on Dash, we've been able to successfully explain why they have gotten Dash wrong. I believe the regulators have come to the table with preset notions about Dash. I think part of it could be the legacy of being named DarkCoin in the past, and the name PrivateSend for our CoinJoin implementation does not help either. We have literally had regulators ask why we would call CoinJoin PrivateSend, but anyway I digress.

    To address this Department of Justice report, there are two paths we can take. We can either ask legal counsel to contact and try to set up a meeting with the DOJ legal counsel. They would usually meet with several members of the regulatory body and try to convince a number of the DOJ attorneys that there are good arguments worthy for calling for additional meetings. Typically this would be done through one-on-one meetings, and then once a critical mass of the authors of the report believe that a broader group would benefit from a larger group meeting, that would then be arranged by legal counsel. Legal counsel would also generally review materials and provide research and applicable law to include in any presentation, to strengthen the legal case in relation to the specific regulators responsibilities. The price tag around something like this in the US can be expensive.

    Alternatively we can attempt to contact the DOJ directly. Given our budget limitations, I've taken upon myself to reach out to the DOJ, over the last couple of weeks I've proactively reached out to over a dozen individuals associated with the report. So far we have had a call with one of the individuals unfortunately has since moved on to a different career path. We also received two emails stating that our request to meet with the appropriate Department of Justice representatives have been forwarded to the appropriate contacts, and for us to kind of stay in a holding pattern to see whether or not there's appetite to sit down with us. So I'll give our emails another week or two to work through the system, and at that point I think as a management team we'll circle back and reevaluate and see whether or not we should go through legal counsel in order to address this issue head on. Again this is an important issue, but as Ernesto alluded, it really is about sitting down with the regulators and educating them on the topic. That's what we've been successfully able to do, and that's what we need to do in this case as well.

  3. Q: Why doesn’t Dash Marketing start a war chest? This has been asked many times by the community but no action taken by CMO Fernando, yet he complains that marketing never has much of a budget and no marketing has been done by DCG for a very long time.
    Q: Could DCG build an 'Evo marketing war chest' of wealth ready in case there is need for extra funds during major Evo releases?
    Q: Why hasn’t Dash marketing been incentivizing the testing of DashPay to get more participants and drum up excitement?
    Q: Has there been any work done from DCG on a Dash Platform release / marketing plan?
    Q: Following the slow but steady loss of interest for Dash as a whole in the last few years, is there anything planned marketing-wise to counterbalance this trend we're living?
    Q: Why have we not set a budget aside for a person with real world sales and marketing experience?
    Q: The Dash Platform should get a decent marketing funding before it is released to the main network. Why not take a residual budget every month for marketing, either as a proposal or automatically?


    A (Fernando): Before addressing the questions directly, I would like to share an announcement. I've resigned from my position at DCG as CMO, and will be leaving soon. This has been a really difficult decision to make. It's been a long time. I really love the project, I believe in the mission, and I think we're getting places. But as I said, it's been a very long time, and I have some other opportunities I need to focus on. I shared this with the team a while ago, and we've been working on a transition process, which is already underway. We'll be publishing the job requirements in the next few days, and kick-start the selection process. I will remain at DCG board as long as the trust protectors will want me there, so I'll still be active in Dash and DCG, but in a different capacity. I think this is the right time for me to make this decision, but also for the project, because 2021 is going to be a huge year for us. We have Dashpay, we have Platform, we have a lot of things going on. There are very exciting developments in the growth side. So there will be a lot of work, and I think it's a great time to onboard someone and get them to do all of this. I hope they can count on the support of all the community, and that there's good times ahead.

    I think it's also very good time to restart the discussion about what our priorities are for marketing and what we want from this function in the project. I will be more than happy to participate in such a discussion, but this time from the other side of the fence as a masternode owner who can share some of his experiences. Lastly I would like to thank everyone for the support along all these years. I got involved with Evan and Darkcoin back in the spring of 2014, and I started working full-time for DCG sometime in 2018. So it's been more than six and a half years involved with the project in different capacities, and almost three working full-time. It's been an amazing ride, it's been very wild, and my life is much better because of Dash. The people I've met along the way the community partners team, the wider industry, it's been really amazing. I can only be grateful for all this time. And again, I still believe in the project, I still believe in the mission, I'm very optimistic about the future. So i'll be around and you can count on me to always support the project. I think that's all that I needed to say.

    With that out of the way, I would like to address the questions, because some of them touch also on this. There were a couple questions - three - that were talking about building a war chest and accumulating budget for marketing and launching Platform and things like that. We've answered this on a couple of occasions in the past, and also it's been mentioned today that DCG has a strong commitment to not requesting more than 60% of the available budget. We believe in decentralization, we believe in a strong community and unfortunately with the prices we've had in the last couple of years, that 60% barely covers compensation. As Glenn has mentioned, we still are not where we want to have the compensation reserve. There's still people volunteering for reduced salaries. So we have not been able to build that budget, and we can't build it right now. But there are other organizations in the community that I think could start that, and that would be a great use of the funds. Again, if there were more budget maybe it would make sense to build this inside DCG, although it also makes sense to build it outside. If the changes or when the change is passed, and there is more budget available, maybe that's something to consider. All these I think are topics for those discussions. I think we need to align on this, now that the proposal system is changing, as are people in DCG. The project has more people doing marketing outside of DCG than in DCG. There's some changes in people and structure and in the proposal systems, so I think it's a good time to address all this.

    The second question about why aren't we incentivizing the testing of DashPay to get more participants and drum up excitement - that's a very good one. The reason why we haven't done this yet is because this first phase of the alpha testing program is a service to the developers. It's a way to get some feedback to them and on the UX, and we can't really manage many users just yet. We're building some tools in the backend, we also are waiting for the next release to hit Evonet so we can have faucets and a few other things that we need to properly run this program. So we're going step by step. In this first one, the goal was to share it with some people in the community, get some excitement in there, but very limited and provide all that information and incorporate that into the development process. But having said that, there are a few contests designed and prepared for when we open the program to the public in a wider way. It's open now - the links to sign up are around - we haven't shared them but there's a drip of people coming in from time to time, because they can find it if they really want to find them. But we'll open it, we're going to be publishing a few pages about DashPay on the website, they should be live in the next couple of weeks I think, the first half of November. They will include a sign up to the alpha testing program, so we can onboard many more people. Again, contingent on a few things, but that's going to happen in the first half of November. From then on, we need to start working on the excitement around DashPay, because that's the big part of the Evolution launch. Platform in the end is the most exciting one, because it's the most powerful one, but it's it's targeted to a narrower market which is developers. But DashPay is targeted to everyone, so that's the one we need to push very hard, very soon.

    A (Ryan): I would like to say a couple of words about Fernando and his involvement with the project. He's really been an invaluable member of the team since all the way back to 2014. He's been an absolute workhorse for the team. He's chipped in on countless different roles over the years, both as a volunteer and as an employee. He has done so at considerable personal sacrifice in terms of doing it at a rate that I don't think anyone else would have done it for. He's been an absolute workhorse for us. He owns responsibility for the website, which he's taken through several overhauls, translations, marketing, events. Even in 2020, yes, events are still happening, they're just virtual in nature. But it still requires coordination and negotiation over time slots and arranging for presentations and everything that's involved. He does all of our video productions and coordinates with all the video productions that we have made outside of DCG, he maintains the forum, trademark enforcement... So all the scams that come up, we do take down notices using our trademark, and he's responsible for those, as well as attaining the trademarks in the first place. He took us through that process all the way from the days of the Dash Foundation to today. All the social media channels, I think we have about nine different social media channels. Press releases, media relations and media inquiries that are incoming, weekly blog updates... There's countless other duties I couldn't even begin to list. It is the work of four people and he's been doing an amazing job with all of those responsibilities. And he's been doing it basically as a volunteer for six years. Hats off to him - he's been a big part of getting us to where we are today. So thank you Fernando, best of luck with what comes next, and I'm so thrilled that you're going to be continuing on with the board and continuing to be involved with the project. Your insights at the board are unique, you bring a unique perspective to the board conversations and it's really valuable. So thank you for your service, I'm sure the community shares my sentiments. It's been really great to have you with the team.

    A (Fernando): Thank you Ryan. To be honest, some of the things you mentioned in reality are done by also many other people around. Sometimes I just coordinate them, or in the middle directing traffic. It's been a great time and a big pleasure, I will really miss the day to day. But anyway it's still going to be probably a few weeks at least until we do this, so I'll be around. Anyone needs anything, you know where to reach me.
 
  1. Q: Has there been any outreach towards PayPal?
    Q: The recent Paypal announcement was an endorsement for several other cryptos. Notably absent was the most payment-focused coin, Dash. Has DCG been in contact with Paypal in the lead-up to this announcement? Is it now? What was PP's feedback? What are the chances of being included in the near future?


    A (Ryan): Let me give an update on PayPal. PayPal has a crypto team within their organization. They chose a partner that is New York based, Paxos, in order to integrate custody services. If BitGo had been selected, Dash I imagine would have been there. But the group that they're working with is based out of New York, which of course subjects us to the BitLicense issue. We have been working on the BitLicense topic for quite some time and have made great progress there. There are some good signs of of things beginning to break there, or breakthrough there, so we are hopeful on that front. In the meantime, we do have direct communication with the crypto team at PayPal. I can't reveal very much, but we do have a call scheduled for tomorrow, so it is a mutual interest. Dash is a payments oriented coin. I firmly believe that Dash should be there when they launch their payment service. They're planning on rolling out crypto payments to their (I'm going to botch the number) but I think it was 34 million merchants globally. You can imagine that I believe Dash would be a really great fit for that. We need to convince PayPal of that too. I imagine a partner like PayPal asking their partners in New York to to integrate Dash might get some attention from their partners. So we're working on the NYDFS issue from multiple fronts. This is another front by which we might be able to apply or get some third party to apply some pressure to make it happen finally for us. We are working our channels, and I worked my connections to get that meeting. We're absolutely focused on PayPal. It's a great, great use case for Dash. So we'll see where those conversations lead. We're going to do our damnest.

  2. Q: Will the next imminent decision proposal from Dash Core Group that focus on changing the Dash budget system, be pre-discussed on the Dash forums (DashPay Reddit, Dash.org/forum, Dash Nation Discord), before the decision proposal gets launched on the network? So far feedback seems to have been collected from the DashTalk Discord only, other official Dash sources for gathering feedback seems to have been largely ignored. This undermines the guidelines from Dash Core Group itself (from strophy), with regards to proposals and the need to gather feedback through pre-discussion on several official Dash channels at the same time.

    A (Ryan): Discussions were held with the community throughout the winter and spring. Prior to the first proposal, we held a series of videoconferences, chats, and AMAs on Reddit and Telegram, and opened each of those discussions to comments and questions. We promoted those events through all Dash social media channels. I also went on Joel’s podcast to discuss the proposed changes and took questions there. We put a great deal of emphasis on providing a lot of opportunities to provide input or ask questions. If you have comments you’d like to share, and missed all the previous opportunities, you can still share your thoughts anytime on Discord through a direct message.

  3. Q: Is it true that Ryan is not 100% committed to Dash Platform and it feels more like a burden to him since he wants to mainly focus on payments? Is that why he did not join Dash Devs Discord? (Hard question, so disclaimer: I think Ryan is great on management and introduced innovative decentralized structures with DIF and supervisors)

    A (Ryan): That is not true. Platform is there to support and enhance a variety of different payments use cases, improve the user experience, and enable applications that will drive transactions. I envision a future with many useful applications related to payments, including invoicing, merchant accounts, trade finance, loyalty, offers, rewards, micro-insurance, and countless other financial and payment tools. I also envision applications like chat that utilize Dash payments inside to facilitate tipping, trading of digital collectables, purchasing of game credits, the list goes on and on. I look forward to seeing what our community invents.

  4. Q: Have you considered using the DIF to hold strategic reserves for the entire DASH ecosystem? Rather than simply as investment-oriented "savings", and using a balancing strategy to hedge DASH to BTC, Gold and other currencies? (EUsouth)

    A (Ryan): This question should be directed to the DIF. Watch out for announcements for their quarterly call.

  5. Q: What is the vision for Dash? Why should we be excited, and in turn make others excited? What does Dash represent? We need to focus on the answers to these questions and rally around a campaign to hammer this message home.

    A (strophy): The vision and mission statement for DCG and how it relates to vision and mission for Dash was updated in the call. The vision for Dash can and should be expressed by the community.

  6. Q: When Dashpay mainnet?

    A (Bob): This was addressed during the roadmap section of the call.

  7. Q: Is there a 0.17 or does it go to 1.0 after 0.16?

    A (strophy): There will be a 0.17. Watch out for the launch of a new DashPay product page and roadmap on the website in the first half of November.

  8. Q: In the context of Litecoin’s transaction count increasing dramatically, how do you define our market and our users? What are the needs that Dash should satisfy? (bhkien)

    A (Ryan): I believe this is addressed in the Market Performance section of the presentation.

  9. Q: The community suggested simply renaming CEO title to something else so we don't have the "Dash CEO" problem anymore. Any plans or problems on doing that?

    A (Ryan): This question has been answered multiple times in the past. For example, see Question 5 of the Q3 2019 Summary Call.
Remaining answers will be posted as soon as possible.
 
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  1. Q: There are online research sources that investors use to make decisions about which crypto coins to invest in. Some of these channels show Dash to be a poor investment due to inaccurate information (example given below in supporting information). Will someone at DCG or Dashpressroom be responsible for periodically and systematically checking these essential investor information sources to make sure that they remain accurate and up to date so that investors are making decisions based on reliable information? (Context, example sites and promotion strategies)

    A (Fernando): We do check some sites mentioned on a regular basis. However, they are not always responsible or willing to make the changes we request, even when we are just trying to correct factual errors. Most of them claim they want to be objective and only publish proven information, which sometimes makes them too difficult to please.

    Our biggest recent effort on this topic was with Messari, with whom we spent a lot of time educating and providing materials (https://messari.io/asset/dash/profile). Their API is widely used, so that was a good opportunity to have the information spread on other sites. Coingecko’s API is also widely used, but we haven’t been able to find anyone as responsive or willing to work with us as in Messari. Coinmarketcap created a self reporting portal recently and we are working with it, but some of the changes we have requested have not gone through and we’re investigating what’s wrong.

    Since we don’t have resources to engage with every site, this is an area where anyone in the community can help using the information in Messari’s profile.

  2. Q: What have been the greatest strengths and areas of improvement within the DCG board governance within this past year?

    A (Robert):
    Strengths:
    - Largely reduced company run-rate and improved cost-effectiveness
    - Strong financial discipline within the company
    - Implementation of scrum development and delivery methodology across the entire organization.
    - More predictable delivery
    - Defined product strategy
    - Clear business development strategy and it’s execution
    - Much improved communication - regular updates on the development progress in form of blog posts and videos, complex updates shared during the quarterly calls, AMAs, Dash Open Door etc.

    Areas of improvement:
    - To address the issue of weak CMC performance
    - Dash classification as a “privacy coin” in media and by regulators

  3. Q: Since Dash is a tech-project, can we have a higher visibility on technical innovation and a vision for the future through the CTO?
    Q: Can we have more engagement from the Dash Platform Product Manager? Currently Platform Devs have to answer all questions.


    A (strophy): Bob shared significant and detailed information during the call about technical innovation, DIPs and timelines, etc., and will continue to do so on quarterly calls, through blog posts and product release notes, videos, etc. by the rest of the team. Engagement by the team on social media or discord is optional for productivity reasons, but any questions to team members not on e.g. Discord can easily be passed on to them by myself or other participating team members.

  4. Q: When Dash Platform is released do testnet and evonet combine or will they always be separate?

    A (Dana): Once Dash Platform is released to testnet, evonet will continue to exist as a separate development environment. The long term vision for evonet is to create a truly agile development environment, whereby the platform team can deliver software that is continuously integrated and deployed to evonet as soon as it is merged into the codebase. To achieve this, DCG needs to retain a high degree of control over the environment, and consequently, most, if not all, nodes will be controlled by DCG. The benefits of creating this type of environment are numerous: the platform team is quickly alerted to problems arising from integration/deployment, the community has access to test the most cutting edge features, the development goal is oriented toward a continuously working product, and transparency between the community and development progress is effortless to demonstrate. Testnet will continue to operate in the role it currently does, which is to test release candidates in an environment that closely approximates mainnet.

  5. Q: Apparently someone bought 160k views for this "What is the Dash FastPass Network?" video. Was this DCG? What were the costs, target KPIs, and how did it perform? What other marketing activities were executed to support FastPass rollout?

    A (Fernando): DCG didn’t do that Youtube campaign. It was a small test done by the Newsroom in the context of research we’re doing together to measure different channels. That campaign obtained very cheap views, but further attempts were all blocked by Google (there are a lot of limitations to crypto ads). Twitter also blocked DCG campaigns. Facebook has not, but the campaign we did there was only for Chile and around actions we are doing locally to open the remittances corridor to Venezuela, so it doesn’t fully compare. We still want to test other channels.

    Also answered here.
 
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