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Dash Retail has released a merchant transaction counter for its point-of-sale app, as well as a revamped rates API for calculating fiat currency valuations.

A Dash treasury proposal, Dash Retail aims to provide a single workable solution for merchants around the world wishing to accept Dash for payments. So far the project has released an alpha point-of-sale app based heavily on the Spark app, a merchant transaction tracker and statistics page, and a conversion rates API to provide a uniform and accurate conversion rate to various fiat currencies. According to project lead Ash Francis, Dash Retail was created to serve the needs of merchants seeking to accept Dash without significant pain points:

“To scale to hundreds of thousands of merchants, Dash needs enterprise grade merchant software. The Dash Retail platform offers that with its improved user experience, bullet-proof reliability the local teams can depend on and enhanced features needed by the DAO, our adoption teams and their merchants. These enhanced features include instant fiat hedging to remove volatility risk from merchants accepting Dash, a fiat-gateway solution to allow people to buy, sell and spend Dash at thousands of locations and a remittance platform to allow people to send money across the world instantly. This is all backed up by best-in-class infrastructure, full reporting and a responsive development team constantly improving the product based upon feedback from the teams and merchants using it.”

Dash Retail joins Spark and Anypay as popular Dash point-of-sale apps, and joins Anypay in providing a transaction statistics resource, while aiming to provide a rounded-out solution beyond the scope of the other two systems.

A community collaboration across Dash-funded projects and volunteer developers

Dash Retail has benefited from collaboration between several different Dash ecosystem projects. The initial point-of-sale app was heavily based on the open-source Spark app, and Dash Rates built on the work of Spark developer Kodaxx, who sees the project as an exciting and much-needed expansion beyond his work:

“Spark itself is pretty solid, but I think what they’ve done with Dash Rates is spectacular. It’s been taken to a whole new level – and since that’s where nearly all of the problems with Spark stemmed from, it was much needed! I have full confidence in Ash and Alex’s development skill and can’t wait to see where it goes.”

Dash Rates is currently implemented into the Dash Retail solution, with plans to be integrated into the official Dash iOS and Android wallets, as well as other projects in the Dash ecosystem. This will enable the entire Dash experience to use the same source of determining real-time fiat currency valuations for Dash, solving a major point of confusion for users.

Dash is steadily learning hard lessons from merchant adoption initiatives

Dash continues to build on the progress of various mass adoption-geared projects, finding, and attempting to solve, barriers to global adoption of the coin as a regular currency for everyday payments. According to Francis, one of the greatest friction points for merchants attempting to accept cryptocurrency is volatility, something Dash Retail aims to address:

“The biggest pain point that Dash Retail will resolve is around volatility. Before Dash Retail most merchants would have to speculate when accepting Dash and when they have suppliers and employees to pay, this becomes a serious issue and cause for concern. By offering an optional service that instantly converts Dash received over a set threshold to a stablecoin (for subsequent fiat payout by their local adoption team) this solution mitigates that volatility risk for merchants, removing this friction point and opening the doors to more merchants.”

Francis sees the value in having reliable sources of merchant data to inform development and adoption efforts, for example the high variability of transaction volume on a day-to-day basis:

“It’s worth noting that whilst we have this data in our tracker, the tracker is still in an alpha stage and we’ll need time to refine it before we have full confidence in that data. The most surprising point is the activity variance, one day can have 20+ transactions, another may just have a singular transaction. One of the most noteworthy data points that comes to mind is the 99.99% uptime of the system – our adoption teams and their merchants rely on the point-of-sale software they use and having a near-perfect uptime is testament to the build quality of the Dash Retail platform and infrastructure.”

Dash Retail’s addition of merchant tracking statistics adds to Anypay’s charts to provide a more complete view of merchant adoption for the Dash ecosystem. In addition to transaction charts, Anypay also maintains a merchant map which color codes businesses based on the last time they received a transaction in cryptocurrency. This allows for a clearer picture of merchant adoption, and also assists local teams in identifying targets for maintaining relationships.