Dash (DASH) Blockchain Halts, Binance Pool Suspends Mining Rewards

Dash, a blockchain that powers the privacy-focused namesake coin, stopped processing transactions and producing new blocks early Monday morning, according to Samuel Westrich, CTO of Dash Core Group.

“There was a problem during v19 activation of Dash Core,” Westrich tweeted around 05:00 UTC (1:00 AM EST). “The chain is halted and currently not producing blocks,” he added. “We have everyone investigating.”

Several hours later, Dash Core developer Pasta tweeted that the developers had identified problems and were working on a solution. “There are two options we are investigating and all are focused on quickly resolving this issue,” Pasta wrote, adding that the planned release of the latest Dash Core client update, v19, may be delayed to resolve the issues first.

According to Pasta, blocks and transactions on Dash will not be considered final until an update is deployed. Exceptions will be made for two types of transactions specific to Dash: ChainLocked and InstantSend locked transactions.

One member of the Dash Discord – citing a conversation with the developers – said the update could be delayed until June 14th.

In the past 10 hours, there have been no fresh updates from the development team, and Westrich did not return CoinDesk’s request for comment by press time.

Following the news, crypto exchange Binance announced that its own mining pool for DASH will suspend the distribution of mining rewards until the blockchain resumes block production.

A user on the DashPay Reddit page suggested that the planned v19 update did not go smoothly. The developers launched a hard fork, which introduced a new type of nodes, and these new nodes created a mess, so the blockchain split into two chains running in parallel.

“The chain seems to have split now with some nodes running forward past the fork block 1874880 and others still stuck at 1874879,” user xkcdmpx wrote. “It looks like about 10-20% of the network is able to move forward, but we don’t have confirmation if this is the ‘correct’ chain.”

Some later posts in the thread had since been deleted and users complained about excessive subreddit moderation on the official Dash forum.

The update for Dash network clients was announced on April 14 and included significant modifications to how the nodes and wallets work. The update requires a hard fork – an irreversible change in the protocol rules that must be adapted by the absolute majority of nodes – otherwise the blockchain will split into two parallel versions of the transaction history.

After the v19 activation, a new version of Dash masternodes will be introduced, with higher security requirements and more authority on the blockchain, according to Dash Core’s official website. Masternodes host full copies of the blockchain and support some complex features of Dash. They must post a security to operate, receive rewards for supporting the network and can also vote to support new projects for Dash.

The update will bring a number of other changes to nodes, wallets, Dash anonymity features, and other aspects of the blockchain’s operation, including copying some of the features of the Bitcoin blockchain. One of the new features will be that transactions that appear to be “stuck” in the queue to be processed will be resubmitted earlier than they are now, after an hour, instead of the current more than 24 hour delay.

At the same time, Dash Core has been working on the Dash Platform v0.24 update on the testnet to bring some high-level updates to how the blockchain works.

Dash was launched in 2014, more than a year later than Ethereum, but has not enjoyed much popularity, currently with a market cap of $493 million, 85th in size on CoinMarketCap.