Dash has experienced a massive surge in the past two weeks with the price of DASH coins rising between December 27, 2016 and January 04, 2017 when it peaked at an all time high of 16.3 USD/DASH.

Trading volumes have surpassed US$4 million per day, a 700% increase from October. At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency is trading at 14.8 USD/DASH and has a market capitalization of US$103 million.

“One of the unique attributes of Dash is that as our price continues to grow, our self-funded budget grows right alongside it,” Ryan Taylor, director of finance for Dash, told CoinJournal. “Many investors in the space are beginning to realize the immense power this feedback loop creates, as it is enabling us to attract new business partners and accelerate our development plans.”

“What we are seeing is a validation that our approach is working as we’ve outpaced the growth rate of both Bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency industry for two years in a row.”

According to him, the spike was likely due to the impending release of a software upgrade called 12.1, which will set the project up for Dash’s decentralized payments system Dash Evolution.

“There are many drivers propelling the recent return to growth,” Taylor said. “Firstly, we announced the release date for the largest upgrade to our software in over a year, one that includes a number of innovative technologies that are firsts in the crypto industry.”

“In parallel, our team is already finalizing plans for Dash Evolution, due out late this year, which will completely change the way consumers and merchants experience cryptocurrency.”

Announced in December 2015, Dash Evolution has been described as “a new type of cryptographic currency with various advanced features that assist in the creation of decentralized technology.” The new system will introduce a tiered network design, which will allow users to do various jobs for the network, along with numerous new features.

Evan Duffield, the lead developer and creator of Dash, stated in an earlier announcement that the goal of Dash Evolution is to “make Dash even more secure, allow it to scale to extremely large levels, and make it easier to use than any cryptographic currency that presently exists.”

A key component in this system is the creation of the world’s first decentralized application programming interface (DAPI) that will allow third tier users to access the network securely. Other new components include DashDrive, a decentralized shared file system that lives on the second tier network; DashPay Decentralized Wallets, light clients connected to the network via DAPI and running on various platforms; as well as a Social Wallet, which allows friends lists, grouping of users and shared multisignature accounts.

“Evolution aims to make using cryptocurrency seamless, which I believe will have an impact similar to what the web browser did to catalyze the growth of the Internet,” Taylor said.

“From instant transaction confirmations to the ease of use we’ll be introducing with Evolution, Dash is completely focused on delivering a great user experience for both consumers and merchants.”

In addition to the advancements in the product, the team also has a number of significant partnerships in the pipeline and is nearing completing on several major integrations, Taylor said.

Dash is set to open a new office in February at the Arizona State University’s SkySong Innovation Center.