The last few years have been quite the adventure for the DASH cryptocurrency. It has made inroads
into South America via Venezuela, and journeyed into the Heart of Africa. And to top it all off,
this year the DASH team have even announced plans to travel into the Brave New World of DeFi.
But how does DASH work exactly, and what are the prospects for the Dash coin and network in
the future? Join me for a deep dive into one of the oldest projects in the crypto space.
DASH was launched in 2014, about five years after the launch of Bitcoin. It has a maximum supply
of 18.9 million coins, and like Bitcoin, DASH has a Proof of Work consensus model,
which means that it has to be mined into existence using computational power.
The team behind Dash sought to improve on Bitcoin by adding faster transactions
and optional privacy. The average block time on DASH is 2.5 minutes, compared to 10 minutes
on the Bitcoin blockchain, which means that Dash has the capacity for faster transactions.
But, even faster payments are available on the DASH network,
thanks to a feature called InstantSend, which allows transactions to bypass
mining and be broadcast directly to the masternodes, where it is quickly processed.
DASH masternodes have other important functions in the ecosystem, including
storing the data of the DASH blockchain,
voting on governance questions and deciding how the DASH development fund is distributed.
The only way to become a masternode is to hold 1,000 DASH.
At current market prices the cost of this would be pretty hefty, but early
investors in the DASH ecosystem have seen a very significant return on their initial investment.
As we mentioned earlier, DASH was one of the first
cryptocurrencies to recognize the importance of privacy.
In the same way that users can opt to use InstantSend, DASH transactions can
also be sent privately using a feature called PrivateSend, which is basically a coin mixer that
is built directly into the DASH protocol. This combines transactions and then sends the coins
to different addresses so that it’s impossible to tell who sent which coins to what address.
The fact that this coin mixer is built directly
into the protocol is a definite plus point for Dash, because the
DASH community can be sure that the mixer hasn’t been compromised by third parties.
However, DASH can’t quite be considered a ‘hardcore’ privacy coin
when compared to more robust projects such as Monero,
because the PrivateSend functionality is optional, and not enforced as standard.
If only a small percentage of DASH users choose PrivateSend,
then their private transactions stand out more, and are more open to on-chain
investigation by government bodies and cybersecurity firms like Chainalysis.
Over the past few years, the DASH marketing and outreach team has carved out a number of
exciting new markets in countries that suffer from high inflation. The recent economic collapse in
Venezuela saw both DASH and Bitcoin adopted as alternative currencies, and this adoption later
spread to countries like Colombia and Argentina, where Venezuelans have migrated in search of work.
DASH also found new adoption in a number of African countries, following an epic
east-to-west road trip across the continent. Since dash focuses on ease-of-use, it’s made it possible
for the project to take advantage of the global proliferation of smartphones, meaning consumers
in countries like Nigeria can use third-party apps like CoinProfile to pay for everyday goods,
without the merchants even having to know that the transaction is taking place in cryptocurrency.
This kind of use case is probably the reason for the recent partnership between DASH
and the stable coin issuer OIN. Not only will this give DASH users the flexibility to switch between
DASH coin and an on-chain stable coin, but it also brings in the beginning of
the project’s entry into the DeFi space, where additional use cases will open up over time.
Only time will tell if these seeds will reap rich fruit for DASH in the years to come.
Are you a Dash coin holder? Let us know your Dash price prediction and thoughts
on its global expanding network. The comments are open. And if this video helped give it a
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