The group behind privacy-centric cryptocurrency, Dash, have acquired the web domain dash.org for just over US$20,000, with funding from three members of the project team.

The Dash team believes that the acquisition of the domain name is a major score for its marketing efforts as it is a premium domain, exactly matches the project’s branding, will be easy to locate on the Web and will bring benefits in SEO rankings.

The purchase of Dash.org was negotiated by “Triptolemoose” – an anonymous Dash community member, and sponsored by three core team members, Evan Duffield – Lead Developer, Daniel Diaz – Business Development Lead, and Robert Wiecko – Project Management Lead.

Duffield briefly described the acquisition process:

Three of us sponsored this initiative out of pocket, for a total of $20,329.99 including escrow and wiring fees, special thanks to Daniel(Minotaur) and Robert(kot) for helping me finance this purchase. The original asking price from the seller was $30,000.00, which is why it was very difficult to negotiate to a reasonable price. The negotiation process was delicate and lead by Triptolemoose over a 2 month period, this project could not be announced publicly upfront as that would put the negotiation in jeopardy and thus we had to request private sponsorship and now wait for budget refunding after the domain was transferred.

The three sponsors will request funding for this from Dash’s decentralized budget system over a period of four months at the coin’s price at the time of the purchase, $2.42. This will work out to 2,100 DASH per month over the four month period.

Duffield added:

We are splitting it up to use as little budget space as possible while at the same time refunding sponsors over a reasonable period of time.

Previously known as Xcoin and then Darkcoin, Dash is attempting to improve on Bitcoin by fully anonymizing transactions and making them instantaneous. Dash accomplishes more privacy through a mixing protocol utilizing a decentralized network of servers called “Masternodes” to avoid the need for trusted third parties that could compromise the integrity of the system. According to CoinMarketCap, Dash is ranked fifth among cryptocurrencies with a market cap of approximately $13.7 million. It peaked at $53.6 million on June 2nd, 2015.