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Dash Merchant – Venezuela has been helping to enable wide scale Dash adoption and usage in Venezuela and recently filmed a video demonstrating that SmartCity, a Dash-enabled KRIP phone seller, has sold over “6 or 7,000 phones”.

Dash’s partnership with KRIP has enabled their phones to come pre-loaded with a Dash wallet, Bitrefill, Uphold, some Dash on a paper wallet, and more. Dash Merchant – Venezuela has also partnered with KRIP to help consumers get their phones set up and ready to spend in minutes. This has allowed Dash to easily be adopted and spent in Venezuela.

However, only 40% of Venezuelans own smartphones, so to address the other 60% of Venezuelans, Dash Text enables consumers to easily spend and receive Dash on non-smartphones (feature phone). They have already seen over 3,000 Dash Text wallets created. Alejandro Echeverría, co-founder of Dash Merchant – Venezuela, Dash Text, and Dash Help has said how Dash Text adoption has been concentrated in rural parts of Venezuela, but that could change.

“In % rate, rural has almost 100% of Dash Text wallet (natural reasons). But in the city the rate has been very high since people have noticed that using Dash Text is easier than using the normal smartphone wallet (no downloads/ internet required) and since our POS from Dash merchant already has the Dash text feature it is very convenient to use Dash Text for everything.”

Merchant and consumer adoption is a priority of Dash

The Venezuelan Dash community’s focus on merchant adoption is seen through the 2,400+ merchants that currently accept Dash; the most recent addition is KFC, the popular fried chicken fast food restaurant. Alejandro and his team have been video recording these merchants and purchases and utilizing the “#venezuelapayswithDash” hashtag. The team also hopes to make a “live tx tracker” available soon so individuals can seen Venezuelan Dash transactions. Right now, Alejandro says they see around 80 transactions per day, on average, but this is a conservative number since not all merchants use their POS service.

Dash focuses a significant portion of both its code development and community adoption around ease of use because many members of the community recognize that reducing switching costs creates an easier on-boarding process and raises the likelihood of adoption and continued use. Alejandro eloquently compared this to the old financial system.

“Just like banks have their support centers to help their clients, Dash has its own. … It is the first support center of a crypto in the world and in my humble opinion is one of the killer features of Dash, because no other crypto provides support to its users in this way.”

Dash enables consumers to keep the ease of use of the old financial system that they are accustomed to, but also provides them with a more sound and transparent currency, along with cheaper fees and more control over their data.

Dash’s development is speeding ahead

Dash has enabled this large adoption via one of the longest functioning DAOs in the cryptocurrency sector, which has allowed Dash to develop transactions that can fit in average block times of 2.6 minutes for less than $0.0005 USD. This is about to get even faster with Automatic InstantSend to securely lock-in simple transactions (under 4 inputs) in 1-2 seconds for no additional fee. Additionally, Dash has announced the development of ChainLocks, which gives Dash significantly more protection against 51% attacks than other cryptocurrencies. Then Dash is planning to release its first stages of Evolution that will create an even more friendly user interface through blockchain usernames and other features.

Even ignoring the future speculation, Dash is seeing major adoption today. Venezuela is in the lead by far, but the United States already has around 500 merchants, and Colombia is not far behind with over 300 merchants and quickly growing. Consumers can also purchase gift cards with Dash on Bitrefill, around the world, or Coincard.ca in Canada, which makes numerous restaurants, stores, phone providers, and more available to Dash users. Dash is accomplishing the original goals of cryptocurrency to be a decentralized, peer-to-peer, digital currency usable in everyday life.