TIME, the popular magazine and news outlet, details how cryptocurrencies can improve freedom around the world, but still needs to make significant improvements.

The article discusses how Venezuelans are suffering from massive hyperinflation, over 1 million percent, which is contributing to long lines and shortages for basic food and supplies. Furthermore, the Venezuelan government taxes money coming into the country, which can face total fees as high as 56% and prevent relief for suffering Venezuelans. TIME then elaborates on how other authoritative regimes are either implementing similarly destructive economic policies and/or tracking payment information.

TIME recognizes the ability of cryptocurrencies to provide solutions to these issues and how Bitcoin started this fight for financial and monetary freedom. However, TIME also observes that Bitcoin has some major roadblocks to overcome before it can help individuals at a major scale.

Innovating to help individuals at scale

TIME claims that “Bitcoin is still a nascent technology, and doesn’t offer cutting-edge usability, speed, or privacy” and discusses the Lightning Network as one of the possible solutions to enabling wider adoption. However, they did not discuss the major problems that the Lightning Network has itself. Aside from technical difficulties, such as routing issues, users still have to open a payment channel, which can become onerous if the main chain remains restricted by unnecessarily limited blocksizes.

Overall, the article highlights that there is a demand for cryptocurrencies to help individuals achieve monetary and financial freedom, but only 1% of the world’s population (around 40 million people) have used Bitcoin. The need to scale in technology and appeal is very real and necessary to help individuals around the globe.

However, Dash has focused on technological innovation and merchant adoption to create an ecosystem that allows consumers to easily use Dash to make everyday purchases. Dash already has over 2,500 merchants accepting Dash in Venezuela and over 4,600 merchants around the world. https://twitter.com/StayDashy/status/1075831361871757313 Some have pointed out that the adoption has had hiccups, such as some individuals not being able to pay with Dash when the store manager is away. It is, nevertheless, still a very real and usable option for Venezuelans as seen in the #VenezuelaPaysWithDash videos. The next steps are to expand Dash’s availability to even more individuals through easier usability and simpler on-boarding.

Dash focuses on easier adoption

Cryptocurrency is still a learning curve for many individuals that are accustomed to cash or bank ATM cards, but Dash is bucking this trend with key initiatives to educate merchants (Dash Merchant – Venezuela), consumers (Dash Help), and make overall adoption more seamless (partnership with Kripto Mobile). Plus, Dash has created Dash Documents as a one-stop location for anyone that wants to dive deep into learning more about how Dash works rather than having to crawl the internet for answers. Dash also plans to soon release Evolution upgrades to make using cryptocurrency even easier, such as usernames rather than alpha-numeric cryptographic keys. These improvements make the Dash on-boarding process much easier than other coins that have left their main clientele, consumers, adrift.

Additionally, Dash is striving to create a cryptocurrency that is usable in everyday transactions, all the time. Dash has achieved transaction fees less than $0.0005 USD, as well as InstantSend confirmations in less than two seconds. This is about to become default and is very important for commercial activities that cannot afford to wait 10+ minutes for reliable confirmations. Dash is able to achieve these record low numbers while also easily scaling, as the most recent stress test demonstrated. The stress test set a record for 3+ million transactions in 24 hours and median transaction fees did not exceed $0.03 USD. While there is still much more adoption and technological innovation to be achieved, Dash has been able to make significant advancements in enabling monetary and financial freedom to individuals around the world while other coins have faltered.