It has been a great week for Dash, and therefore the world, with some awesome news developments! Continue reading to get a summary of the week!

Dash Integrations of the Week:

Church’s Chicken Accepts Dash at 10 Venezuelan Location: The popular chicken restaurant that claims 1,700 restaurants across 25 countries began accepting Dash payments from customers at 10 of their 13 Venezuelan locations this week. The integration was led by Dash Venezuela with help from Dash Core Group. The integration marks a significant addition to the over 2,400 merchants that are currently accepting Dash in Venezuela and 4,400+ Dash-accepting merchants around the world.

Bitnovo Integrates Dash Text: The company that enables consumers to easily purchase cryptocurrency, including Dash, through physical gift cards sold in stores will now be integrating Dash Text. The service provides a much cheaper and easier remittance process since users can simply buy a gift card in a store, verify the pin, and enter their loved one’s phone number to send them Dash. Dash not only provides advantages via very low fees and fast confirmation times, but by also offering rapidly growing merchant adoption, which mitigates the need to use fiat exchanges as some other cryptocurrencies would have to do.

Node40 and Alt36 Partner To Help Cannabis Businesses Maintain Compliance: Node40, the cryptocurrency tax compliance company and Alt36, the point-of-sales system geared towards cannabis businesses announced a business partnership to help Dash-accepting cannabis merchants stay compliant. The cannabis sector in the United States exists in a weird semi-legal environment, which makes compliance a nightmare. Alt36 offers many solutions to ease those headaches and this new partnership will help ensure cannabis businesses using Dash can stay tax compliant and mitigate unnecessary regulatory attention.

Dash Growth of the Week:

Thousands of KRIP Phones Sold in Venezuela: A few months ago, Dash announced a partnership with Kripto Mobile to provide KRIP phones pre-loaded with a Dash wallet, Bitrefill, Uphold, some Dash on a paper wallet, and more. Recently, a KRIP phone reseller discussed how he has already sold over “6 or 7,000 phones”. This, along with consumer and merchant support from Dash Help and Dash Merchant – Venezuela, has significantly eased the on-boarding process for Dash. Additionally, Dash has been able to support the 60% of Venezuelans that do not own smartphones via Dash Text.

Dash Announcements of the Week:

Dash Core Claims Long-Term Stability: Ryan Taylor, CEO of Dash Core Group, recently wrote a blog post discussing his confidence in Dash Core Group’s long-term stability since they had purposeful restrained their growth to prepare for a market downturn. Additionally, many Dash Core Group employees have volunteered to temporarily work at a reduced pay or none at all since they deeply believe in Dash more than just the pay. Overall, Ryan highlighted that “DCG is not at risk of shutting down anytime soon, or of any significant cuts in staffing levels in the near term”. This illustrates Dash’s resilience as other cryptocurrencies have struggled to fund their development teams.

General News of the Week:

Cryptocurrency Users Double, Dash Mimics Trend: A new study reveals that cryptocurrency users have nearly doubled since 2017 and nearly tripled from 2016 in both total users and verified users. The move signals growing interest in the space and, since Dash has exhibited a similar pattern, provides confidence that more users will discover the everyday usability of Dash causing the exchange price to follow.

Litecoin Whale Brings Decentralization Issue to the Forefront: A significant portion, around 60%, of Litecoin’s coin supply was recently moved and many suspected it to belong to one entity. It highlights the fact that around 44% of Litecoin’s coin supply wealth is concentrated in the top 100 addresses compared to around 14% for Dash. Dash’s better wealth distribution helps enable greater adoption and everyday usage since it distributes spending and saving across more individuals.

Bitcoin Cash Explores Dash-Like Double-Spend Protection With Avalanche: OpenBazaar lead backend developer and Bitcoin Cash advocate Chris Pacia recently explored a new method for expanding the security of zero-confirmation transactions, Avalanche. The method involves selecting a moving group of 100 nodes, each of which votes for a transactions as valid or invalid and cross-references each other to determine a valid transaction by a majority of votes after a few rounds, which takes 3-5 seconds. This is similar to Dash’s InstantSend, but has key differences since InstantSend relies on masternodes, whom are required to stake 1,000 Dash, actually lock a transaction for security, and better protect against sybil attacks since it is much harder for a bad actor to spin up multiple nodes due to the required collateral.

Cryptocurrency Friendly Startups Challenge Banking Hegemony: Robinhood and Revolut are two new startups that are attempting to challenge the status quo of the banking hegemony and are doing so by appealing to millenials with better services, including cryptocurrency services. Their success demonstrates a demand for an alternative to the current financial and monetary system, along with a demand for cryptocurrency. Dash is also helping to offer this alternative by not only focusing on technological innovation, but also focusing on adoption so Dash users can spend and use Dash in everyday life, which is integral to a currency.

SWIFT Causes Headache for Remitters, Dash Offers Reprieve: A recent story detailed how SWIFT tied up £11,000 intended for 36 orphans in Zambia along with similar stories, which highlighted the inefficiencies and frustrations of the remittance process. Cryptocurrencies offer a solution by giving control back to consumers and allowing them to send international payments for fractions of the current remittance fees, such as Dash with median fees of less than $0.0005 USD. Dash further improves this by focusing on merchant adoption so remittance receivers can easily spend the Dash they received rather than having to covert to fiat, as would be the case for some other cryptocurrencies.

Dash Media of the Week:

Dash Podcast Featuring Ryan Taylor: This week the three amigos chat with Ryan Taylor, CEO of Dash Core Group and ask him your user submitted questions about Dash’s development, outlook, budget, and more. Overall, Ryan is really confident in Dash and the Dash Core Group to deliver an excellent, decentralize, peer-to-peer, digital currency to the community. Make sure to check this out since you don’t want to miss this knowledge!

Dash is productively building future infrastructure with new integrations, developments, and announcements! Make sure to follow Dash News on all our media outlets to stay up to date on all the latest Dashiness. We hope that our content and coverage was very informative and enjoyable this week and we cannot wait to see what awesome Dash News awaits us next week!