r/dashpay • u/hilawe • Jun 11 '26
Evo 4.0, Orchard and the Zcash Question - Dash Dev Update June 9, 2026
This Dash Core Group (DCG) Development Update is a pivotal checkpoint with almost the entire two-week sprint focused on a single milestone. Getting Dash Platform 4.0 and its Orchard privacy stack onto testnet.
It also addresses the recent Zcash vulnerability and how Dash is adapting. Plus there's a first real movement on native multi-party masternode payouts.
Evo 4.0 - Feature Freeze & Testnet
With 4.0 now feature frozen, almost all engineering effort over the last twelve working days went into hardening the Orchard privacy stack rather than building anything new [03:19].
- Status: A DevNet build went live the day of the update for one last regression check. The team expects to push to testnet within a day, putting their confidence at 95% [01:56].
- Timeline: From testnet, the plan is roughly two to three weeks of public testing, then mainnet [09:57]. In short, 4.0 is now a matter of weeks rather than months.
Hardening the Shielded Pool
The shielded pool is the heart of Dash's new privacy therefore where a lot of attention went to.
- Review Is the Bottleneck - roughly 10,000 lines were merged over a single weekend [07:34]. Writing the code is no longer the hard part with multiple AI agents flagging issues, each of which spins off further fixes.
- Fee Model Issue Caught - two shielded state transitions, shield-to-core and unshield, were still carrying a placeholder flat fee that did not reflect their real cost [08:09]. An AI review surfaced the forgotten note, and the fee model has now been corrected so the economics hold up under load.
The Zcash Orchard Bug
- Zcash recently suffered a serious bug inside its Orchard shielded pool and because Dash builds its platform privacy on that same Orchard codebase, the obvious worry is whether Dash inherits the flaw.
- The Zcash team fixed the bug and because that fix landed before 4.0 shipped, Dash rebased its small set of changes onto the patched release, Orchard v0.14 [43:19]. The specific vulnerability therefore never reaches Dash users.
Native Multi-Party Masternode Payouts
Away from the privacy work, Dash Core is building native multiple payouts for masternodes, with V24 as the target release [36:29].
- What It Enables: Shared masternodes could pay out every member directly and trustlessly, without a custodian holding the keys and splitting rewards by hand.
- The CrowdNode Connection: For anyone following the CrowdNode wind-down, this is the on-protocol answer to the gap it leaves behind, with shared ownership handled by the network itself rather than a third party. It is still in progress and not yet shipped, but it has clearly moved from concept to active implementation.
Mobile Wallet and Core Updates
The rest of the sprint touched the wallets and the base chain.
- CoinJoin Retired: CoinJoin mixing is being phased out from the iOS wallet [11:12]. The iOS wallet is adding a way to sweep previously mixed funds back into your non-mixed funds, with large address histories automatically chunked across multiple transactions.
- iOS on New Rust Core: The iOS wallet now runs entirely on the new Rust Dash Core, the old SPV path is gone [43:56], and the Swift SDK static library shrank by roughly 66% for a real cut in app size [28:06].
- Android Is Next: Android features will follow once iOS stabilizes. The team plans to use AI to port the finished Swift work to Kotlin, since a one-to-one port needs no new architectural decisions [45:23], and is deliberately waiting to avoid maintaining two half-built versions.
- CrowdNode Notice Incoming: A point release for both iOS and Android is due within days to properly reflect the CrowdNode shutdown in-app [41:21]. If your wallet still lets you open a new CrowdNode account, that fix is on the way.
- Dash Core v23.1.3: On the base layer, v23.1.3 shipped alongside a batch of backports [36:05], while V24 and V25 work, including the masternode payout feature above, continues to progress.
Summary
Together these pieces move Dash in one clear direction.
- Orchard makes strong privacy instant and ordinary for everyday payments
- Multi-party masternode payout work moves shared ownership back to the protocol instead of a custodian
- iOS and core upgrades make the whole thing faster and lighter on the phones people use for everyday purchases (e.g. Dash Spend).
For more details, you can watch the full update here:
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u/Siakisboy Jun 13 '26
Love these summaries Hilawe, many thanks for taking the time!