Spork 15 Activation: April 2

Dash Community,

We are currently at over 67% of masternodes registered with the Deterministic Masternode List. This is terrific progress given that DIP3 was activated just 9 days ago! However, it does not appear we are going to meet the spork 15 activation criteria this budget period. Based on the activation criteria, at 67% of masternodes registered, the rate of masternodes registering would have had to slow to less than 2.13% per day to justify a discontinuation of the process, and it is still going strong at over 3%.

Therefore we now plan to activate spork 15 on April 2, the day after the next super block payout. By that time, the masternode network will have met our activation criteria under any scenario. Masternode owners should continue registering with the Deterministic Masternode List as soon as possible. Instructions on how to register can be found here. It is critical that masternode owners register before the activation of spork 15 on April 2 to continue receiving payments.

Why the spork 15 activation criteria?

We created an activation formula to ensure we were balancing the competing objectives of the spork activation timing. These objectives include providing adequate time for masternode operators to register, and ensuring the spork is activated early enough in a voting cycle for proposal owners to recover lost votes. At the same time, we wanted to ensure that as we approached the 80% target, the network would not be held back if activation rates tailed off. The formula we proposed balanced the above objectives, while more aggressively discounting the importance of adoption rate as registration approached the ideal 80% target. The deadline of March 8 was set to minimize the impact to the proposal system, as the activation of spork 15 will reset proposal votes. We were concerned about multi-month proposal owners not having enough time to recoup votes. The deadline was selected because it is ~25% of the way into the voting period.

Please cast your votes!

Therefore, at this time masternode owners should feel free to begin casting their votes on proposals without concern that they will be reset. In the meantime, the team is working on a few updates to Dash Core v0.13 (separate communication coming on this), in addition to continuing work on Dash Core v0.14.

Thank you again to all masternode owners for the great progress made towards finalizing the Dash Core v0.13 update. We are really excited to continue rolling out new features together!