Dash development update: developers introduce ‘Long Living Masternode Quorums’

In a recent tweet, Dash announced on their official Twitter handle, another development update that the team has been working on.

The announcement read:

“Introducing Long Living Masternode Quorums! Just another step in the $Dash Evolution Revolution!”

The Alexander Block, Core Developer at Dash elaborated in detail about ‘Long Living Masternode Quorums’ or LLMQs on Dash’s official blog.

The developer stated that the project is currently under development. The community will see some impacts in the future on some Evolution and non-Evolution topics and features, he said.

Alexander said, the current Quorum [collection of entities that are able to vote on something] system utilized by the team poses difficulties and limitations and cannot be used in particular use cases. In order to eliminate the drawback of the present system, the team devised LLMQs as a solution. The LLMQs are long living and it increases the use of only certain required resources like CPU, RAM, network on its members and avoids increasing the load on the entire network.

Furthermore, he said that the Quorum is built beforehand and reused for a certain period of time instead of selecting a new Quorum when the demand arrives. He stated:

 “The reason for this is that an LLMQ performs M-of-N threshold signing sessions to gain majority consensus when decisions need to be made. The new M-of-N scheme requires executing a trustless and distributed key generation (DKG) protocol before actual signing/voting can happen. Since this DKG protocol is quite resource-intensive, we do it in advance and then reuse the keys for multiple signing sessions.”

In contrast to the existing system, the LLMQs only require the members of Quorums to perform propagations and validation of votes and the final result is propagated to the remaining portions of the network only after a certain amount of votes are collected. He added:

“Since the final result is the outcome of a BLS based M-of-N threshold signing session, it’s just a single BLS signature. Propagating only this single signature in the network requires a lot less CPU, RAM, and network bandwidth resources.”

The LLMQs will occur in different sizes and longevity which will be supported fully, he explained. The type will be selected depending on the use case. The best example of the use case of LLMQs is Dash’s InstaSend.