Introduction
Dash Intents is a trade-intent protocol for Dash Evolution. A user publishes what they want to trade and the terms they will accept. Independent and pooled market makers compete to satisfy it. The best offer wins, and the user never picks a route, a venue, or a counterparty.
Market making is an open role; anyone may run one. The verified tier are masternode operators: they already run infrastructure, they are already identified on-chain by a ProTxHash, and they already have an economic stake in the network. For a masternode operator, running a market maker adds no new server.
Shielded transactions — a committed core feature
Shielded Tokens are a committed core feature of Dash Intents: when they are released, shielded swaps will work natively through the same intent flow — sign the outcome, market makers compete to fill it. This is a stated commitment, not a shipped feature: Shielded Tokens are not yet released, and support lands as soon as they are.
The privacy landscape today (verified 2026-10-13): none of the pool-based cross-chain DEXs offers private swaps. Across THORChain (36 pools), Maya (25 pools), and Chainflip, Monero is listed on none of them, and the one privacy coin they do list — Zcash — trades through transparent vault addresses (Maya's ZEC vault is a transparent t-address). Monero's decentralized liquidity instead lives on P2P and atomic-swap venues (Haveno, Bisq, eigenwallet, BasicSwap). This commitment is one no pool-based DEX has made.
The two documents, and what travels between them
Intents and settlements are records on Dash Platform, held in a Data Contract. Offers are not on-chain: they are exchanged over Nostr, where they are cheap, fast, and replaceable. An offer that wins the auction is what produces a settlement record.
| Record | Where it lives | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| intent | Dash Platform | The user's request and its terms |
| offer | Nostr | A market maker's competing quote |
| settlement | Dash Platform | The record of what was filled |
What is already published
- The Data Contract on testnet, version 1:
66UbfEca1EFPRTm6zMz8HL7Rp1WkGh9wxJ7QhZjYS2ih - The SDK, in TypeScript and JavaScript
- The masternode daemon
evomm, written in Rust, with a text menu, a terminal dashboard, and a loopback web UI - The Nostr offer layer
- This documentation site and the main website
Everything above was delivered before any funding. SeeArchitecturefor how the pieces fit together.