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Discover Dash has launched a native mobile app for its merchant directory in partnership with Really Bad Apps.

A merchant listing dedicated to providing easy access to all the Dash-accepting businesses around the world, Discover Dash is arguably the world’s largest listing of cryptocurrency-accepting businesses with over 4,800 merchants. To improve the quality of the user experience for the average Dash user, Discover Dash partnered with mobile app development group Really Bad Apps to produce a streamlined dedicated mobile version of the app for Android. The mobile version of Discover Dash offers geolocation to effectively locate merchants closest to the user, as well as automatic translation into English, Spanish, and Russian, and allows users to filter by a wide range of categories including restaurants, entertainment, business services, and Dash ATMs, giving easy access for users seeking to buy Dash at an ATM near them. It is now available for download in the Google Play store.

Discover Dash was first announced in May of 2017, and within a year was re-released with a streamlined experience and live support chat function and passed 1,000 merchants listed globally. Under a year later this number has been multiplied nearly five times. According to Matthew Carlstrom, Really Bad Apps co-founder and VP of Product, the team saw an opportunity to advance the usability of cryptocurrency for mobile users:

“From the beginning we have been passionate about the opportunities that cryptocurrency creates for mobile users around the world. Developing a native app for Discover Dash has been an amazing experience, and we’re looking forward to seeing the community grow as Dash customers use our app to discover the many businesses that accept Dash nearby.”

The first complete iteration of the Discover Dash app was created by Really Bad Apps free of charge because of the team’s belief in the projects long-term viability.

Streamlining access to Dash’s impressive merchant count

Our partner Cryptobuyer is offering a zero fee promo on its ATMs to celebrate partnering with Traki stores in #Venezuela. @Cryptobuyer will offer a zero fee promotion on its ATM network for Dash transactions starting today until May 1st. https://t.co/QiMLFtEDCz #payments #crypto https://t.co/9avajfnIb9 — DASH (@Dashpay) March 28, 2019

The release of a streamlined mobile app for Discover Dash vastly improves the usefulness of Dash’s significant merchant count to its community of users. According to Discover Dash Co-Founder and Webmaster Mark Mason, providing an efficient mobile experience when locating Dash-accepting merchants is a critical step for facilitating wide adoption among Dash’s global user base:

“We wanted to provide a practical solution that is user-friendly and suited for mass adoption to help facilitate the expanding Dash ecosystem. The Discover Dash mobile app helps you to easily locate merchants to spend Dash wherever you are in the world, right from your Android device. The worldwide directory of business and services that accept Dash is now fast approaching 5,000 merchants. The creation of this app was essential in order to help facilitate the surge in growth of merchant listings and strong consumer demand. The mobile app provides a greater user-experience and is a one stop resource for the international Dash community to search & find Dash accepting businesses.”

At present, Discover Dash lists over 4,800 known merchants worldwide that accept Dash for payments. Thousands of these are located in Latin America, most notably Venezuela and Colombia, a region which has experienced significant growth due to hyperinflation and remittances, two use cases that Dash is well-suited to tackle with its limited supply emission and extremely cheap transactions to anywhere in the world. Recently, Latin American exchange Cryptobuyer partnered with Venezuelan department store chain Traki, waiving fees for Dash purchases over its ATM network to facilitate the sending of remittances, which can then be spent at Traki thanks to the chain accepting Dash payments through Cryptobuyer’s point-of-sale merchant solution. Users will now be able to use the Discover Dash mobile app to easily locate both ATMs in the Panama area to buy Dash from, and merchants at which to spend the Dash once received.

We're publishing Dash Core Group software repos! https://t.co/3AAeDv2qGS — Nathan Marley (@ngmarley) March 27, 2019

Dash has completed two of three critical developments for wide adoption this year

The Dash development team has produced several major improvements this year alone, filling several important gaps before Dash becomes a fully-viable product for general public use. Earlier this year, the version 0.13 update was released, representing one of the most significant overhauls of Dash to date. Most significantly in this update is InstantSend by default, enabling Dash’s special instant transactions feature by default for nearly all transactions, waiving the extra fee and creating a true universal instant transaction experience for Dash users and merchants. The second major update, version 0.14, was recently released on testnet, and includes ChainLocks, an innovation to leverage the masternode network to protect against 51% mining attacks. This will make the Dash network significantly more secure and reliable, creating a payment network where businesses and their customers do not have to worry about major disruptions.

Finally, Dash’s version 1.0, the initial version of the long-awaited release codenamed Evolution, is scheduled for subsequent release. This update will include blockchain usernames and contact lists, giving a streamlined and social user experience instead of the present-day cryptocurrency experience of long cryptographic hashes. The combination of these three important updates will create arguably one of the fastest, most secure, and easiest to use decentralized payment systems in the world. These updates have been developed in private, however the first repositories have recently been made public, with the entirety of the Evolution platform intended for open-source release once completed.