Evan Duffield is a well-known American software developer. Duffield is responsible for creations like the X11 mining algorithm and Dash, a cryptocurrency focused on making instant transactions and with support for anonymous transactions.
EThe creator of the cryptocurrency Dash and X11 mining algorithm, Evan Duffield, was born in the United States in 1980. Duffield was born in Arizona, where he would achieve his greatest success later. At just 15 years old, Duffield began to sketch his future after beginning to show concern for computer programming.
Thus, at the age of 20, Evan Duffield began his career as a developer in the technology industry. Among the companies he worked with stand out Warped AI, iAcquire, Wells Fargo y Verizon Wireless. In all of these companies, he held primarily a position as a software developer. During this time, Duffield focused his curiosity on developing data analysis techniques. He also showed interest in the development of artificial intelligence algorithms.
This gave him new prospects for opportunities in the mid to late 2000s. He had the opportunity to work for many companies that provided social networking services for their clients. His main area of specialization in these firms was technological improvement. He designed protocols that helped these companies handle large volumes of data to offer stronger social networking services.
Evan Duffield's beginnings in the world of cryptocurrencies
Duffield's career as a software developer and specialist in blockchain Beginning to participate in the crypto community, it took off in 2010. At that time, Duffield had been greatly fascinated by Bitcoin, the project of Satoshi Nakamoto.
Duffield had read the whitepaper of Bitcoin and, amazed by technology, he decided to research and learn from it. As a result, he obtained a wide knowledge base that allowed him to have a better understanding of it and its possibilities. Despite the skeptical atmosphere that hung over cryptocurrencies, Duffield intuited a promising future for cryptocurrencies and their enormous usefulness. This was how he began to develop cryptocurrency ideas that soon gave rise in January 2014 to XCoin.
This first attempt by Evan Duffield had in mind to create a cryptocurrency that would improve Bitcoin's performance. Unfortunately, XCoin contained a bug in the code that allowed 2 million coins to be mined in a matter of days. Given this, Duffield repaired the error, managing to mitigate this critical circumstance. Despite this, XCoin offered some advances against the queen currency, Bitcoin. As for example, its X11 algorithm and the ability to make anonymous transactions that surpasses Bitcoin's pseudo-anonymity ability.
The development of X11
With the appearance of XCoin, Duffield made several of its improvements public, and the most important of them is X11. This is an algorithm of hashing widely used by other cryptocurrencies today. This method uses a chaining of hashing algorithms to provide greater security to the cryptocurrency mining process. The process after this is simple, X11 uses 11 different hashing algorithms so that the end result is as safe and efficient as possible. If any flaw is discovered in an algorithm in the chain, this does not affect the final result, as there will be other algorithms that will correct this vulnerability.
With this algorithm, Duffield sought to maximize security and prevent the ASIC they could mine X11 with ease. The latter pursued the goal of making the distribution of processing and coins fairer.
The hashing algorithms X11 uses in its method are:
- BLAKE
- BMW
- GROESTL
- JH
- KECCAK
- SKEIN
- LUFFA
- CubeHash
- shavite
- SIMD
- ECHO
The renaming of the XCoin project
After discovering the XCoin programming bug, Duffield prompted the project name change. From there, it stopped being called XCoin to become known as DarkCoin. However, the community did not perceive in a positive way the connotation that the name projected DarkCoin.
After some deliberations and proposals, Duffield changed the name to Digital Cash or Dash. This name was more aligned with the perspective of the community. Above all, taking into account the objective of the project to replace cash with digital cash. Reason why Dash was perceived as a much more appropriate name from a product marketing point of view.
Evan Duffield's role in Dash evolution
Following the renaming of the project, Duffield began to elevate his dedication to Dash. To do this, it first created a development Core that it chaired in order to guarantee the development of the cryptocurrency. But at the same time, he created a DAO (autonomous decentralized organization) for the governance of cryptocurrency. DAO, on the one hand, was in charge of managing the growth and governance of the project. While the development Core was in charge of making the roadmap and the technology necessary to turn Dash into what was desired.
This particular organizational form gave Dash a huge boost and allowed him to expand rapidly. Firstly, Duffield and his team enhanced Dash's capabilities to make their transactions secure and anonymous, giving rise to PrivateSend. At the same time, he began to develop InstantSend a feature to make crypto payments instantly. With both options, Duffield sought to position Dash among the best cryptocurrencies. All this driven by features that no other officially offered. The result of this was a complete success, as Dash would become one of the 10 most important cryptocurrencies.
With the success of his project, Duffield left his CEO position at the Dash Core, and focused on Dash Labs, where he has maintained a less public profile. From there he runs free software projects in order to maintain Dash's decentralization at all times.