Privacy focused cryptocurrency Dash has experienced a very strong rally recently. From the last time we reported on it, Dash’s price has already increased about 20%, from under $16 to over $19.3. And in total, Dash’s market capitalization has soared 70%, since the start of the year, nearing a record of $140 million.

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The rally has been sustained by trading volumes at all time highs, with an average of over $2 million worth of Dash bought and sold every day, making Dash the sixth most traded cryptocurrency in the world.

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The cryptocurrency has been adopted by two bitcoin hardware wallets recently, TREZOR and KeepKey, and Dash has also opened new headquarters at Arizona State University’s SkySong Innovation Center. However, Dash’s recent price and volume growth is largely attributed to its recent software launch of Sentinel, which sets the foundation for the its decentralized payments system Evolution.

We asked Ryan Taylor, Director of Finance at Dash, for his take on the matter.

To what do you attribute Dash’s recent price rise?

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It’s very hard to pinpoint one reason for our recent price rise — just about everything is going right for Dash lately. We just deployed our first major release in 18 months and I don’t believe it could have gone any smoother. We are also benefiting from the positive feedback loop of our rising price, which is enabling our budget system to fund larger integrations, hire more developers, and increase our presence at conferences.

I think the market is watching our project very closely, because we are the first to solve a wide swathe of the issues plaguing first generation cryptocurrencies like governance, funding, instant transactions, privacy, and improving the end user experience.

Do you see Dash’s price rally continuing?

We believe this is just the beginning. As our price increases, our network generates even more investment dollars to direct towards the development of our ecosystem. We’re able to actively build out our ecosystem of services in a way no other coin can.

As the utility of our ecosystem grows, it attracts new users and investors that further our growth. Our market cap has grown at a rate more than double that of Bitcoin and more than the entire altcoin market for each of the past three years. We’re on pace to do that again in 2017. That long term trend should continue.

How is the Dash community receiving Sentinel (12.1)?

Most of the benefits of 12.1 are “under the hood” improvements required to support our flagship product Evolution, due out around the end of this year. Even so, our users seem to love the new version, which improves our privacy feature, carries lower fees, and provides easier access to information about the network.

From an end user perspective, Evolution will deliver an order of magnitude improvement in the user experience of cryptocurrency.