Introduction¶

The Base SDK for Dash is a collection of packages that enable applications to parse, construct and interact with the Dash blockchain. This is achieved by leveraging the rust-bitcoin ecosystem to provide a framework that builds upon existing, familiar APIs and contract expectations.

To achieve this, state-independent portions of the consensus engine have been split into composable packages that can be imported as needed.

Some packages depend on other packages to expose their full functionality. Packages are primarily placed in three buckets (see below). When upgrading downstream packages, it is recommended to version-match with the lowermost bucket utilised by your packages.

Foundation packages. These packages provide unopinionated Bitcoin-compatible data manipulation.
Base packages. These packages implement specific algorithms but without chain-distinguishing consensus logic.
Protocol packages. These packages define the Dash protocol as deployed, blocks, transactions, chain parameters.

graph LR
  subgraph " "
    types[dash-types]
    num[dash-num]
  end
  subgraph "  "
    script[dash-script]
    pow[dash-pow]
    pkc[dash-pkc]
  end
  subgraph "   "
    primitives[dash-primitives]
    params[dash-params]
    p2p_core[dash-p2p-core]
  end

  types --> num
  types --> script
  types --> pkc
  types --> primitives
  types --> p2p_core
  num --> pow
  num --> pkc
  num --> primitives
  num --> params
  num --> p2p_core
  script --> primitives
  script --> p2p_core
  pkc --> p2p_core
  pow -.-> primitives
  pow -.-> params
  primitives --> params
  primitives --> p2p_core
  params --> p2p_core

Note: Solid lines are build dependencies, dotted lines are test dependencies.

Versioning and Platform Policy¶

Warning

As the Base SDK is in early development, the public contract and API shape should be considered unstable. Releases are made sporadically on an ad hoc basis with YYYY-MM-DD tags and packages have a fixed version of 0.0.0. Stable releases will be made in accordance with Semantic Versioning.

The minimum supported Rust version has an upper cap at the version of Rust available with Debian stable (last updated, trixie). The current MSRV is 1.85.0 (source).
Some features rely on Rust nightly (notably affected is core::simd, see rust-lang/portable-simd#364), building packages with the full feature will pull in these dependencies. Consuming packages built on Rust stable are recommended to manually select the features desired from the package alongside std.
Packages are validated against the version of nightly pinned in rust-toolchain.toml, SDK functionality is tested only against the pinned version. Regressions on succeeding versions are evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
no_std + alloc is the baseline target, the public contract is limited by what is feasible by this baseline target. std is primarily a passthrough to std features provided by dependent crates, no additional functionality is offered by the SDK itself through std enablement.

Crates by default offer the following features, any additional features offered by crates are defined in their respective sections.

Feature	Capabilities enabled	Defined by every package
(baseline)	`no_std` + `alloc`, always available.	Yes
`std`	Standard library support.	Yes
`full`	All non-conflicting features.	Yes
`serde`	Serialization using `serde`.	No (dependent on feature set)
`_internal`	Exposes internals for tests and benchmarks.	Yes (not part of API contract)

Is the SDK a full node?¶

The Base SDK is not a full node implementation nor does it intend to be. no_std + alloc restricts I/O and networking making it better suited for resource-constrained, sandboxed or otherwise limited environments. The public contract reflects this, restricted to only stateless or relatively context-independent portions of the overall consensus engine.

For a more batteries-included solution, consider rust-dashcore or the C++ reference implementation, Dash Core over RPC, REST or ZMQ.