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We’re experiencing system issues due to a power shutdown at one of our facilities, initiated after smoke was detected following routine maintenance. We’re working to restore services as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience. — Wells Fargo (@WellsFargo) February 7, 2019

Wells Fargo has experienced consistently recurring services outages, highlighting the importance of decentralized financial systems.

Over the past week, banking mainstay Wells Fargo has experienced various service and system outages. Last Friday, customers reported the inability to access the mobile banking app, with intermittent service to the online banking portal as well. Outages persisted and have reoccurred today across the platform. According to Wells Fargo, these may be linked to a power shutdown at a facility. These shutdowns have limited customer access to their funds, and many have voiced frustration across social media.

The inherent drawbacks of centralized points of failure

Service disruptions such as these underscore the value proposition of decentralized financial systems. Banking services such as Wells Fargo offer customers a more convenient way of storing funds than simply stockpiling cash, and facilitate payments both in-person and online. However, drawbacks exist to lending total financial control to a single entity. Beyond the more unusual risk of censorship or confiscation, the regular risk of service downtime, system failure, or individual error increase the odds that a customer will have no access to their funds during critical periods.

The main value proposition of cryptocurrency, beyond its borderless and permissionless nature, is its decentralization. Decentralized digital currencies are designed to have no central point of failure, where a collection of nodes or miners can go offline without bringing down the entire access. A truly global, robust, and decentralized system allows users to maintain constant access to their funds, even under adverse circumstances.

Dash’s goal of a frictionless and decentralized money and payment platform

Dash represents a strong attempt to provide an advanced payments system and currency able to out-compete traditional systems on ease of use and efficiency, while maintaining a decentralized structure and giving users complete control over their own funds at all times. Dash plans to scale to support mass adoption transaction levels while maintaining low fees, and supports instant permanent settlement with InstantSend functionality. Additionally, the Dash Evolution platform, currently under development, aims to provide a smoother customer experience via intuitive features such as usernames and contact lists, while still maintaining a decentralized and trustless structure that has been a hallmark of cryptocurrency since its inception.