Dash (DASH) has been around for some time now and initially was advertised as a privacy coin but that has since changed. After facing the bear market, Dash has recently seen some gains also like the rest of the market has been seeing for the start of 2020.

The Beginning

Evan Duffield, founder of Dash

Dash was created by Evan Duffield back in 2014. Duffield previously worked at a few tech companies as a software developer and after discovering Bitcoin, he decided to tackle some of the issues that Bitcoin has. Originally the coin was launched as Xcoin, then rebranded to a questionable name of Darkcoin. During that time, a lot of negative media about the dark web being tied to crypto and that gave a bad reputation to a coin being called Darkcoin and marketed for its privacy features. That eventually lead to a final rebranding to what is known today as Dash, Digital and Cash.

Dash is originally a fork of Litecoin, and which Litecoin (LTC) is a fork of Bitcoin (BTC). So Dash has many of the features of BTC and LTC but with the added privacy feature of "untraceable" transactions. Dash used a coin mixing feature that basically works like CoinJoin they call "PrivateSend" that allowed for untraceable transactions. However, with the latest analysis tools and flaws, the untraceable nature comes into question.

Originally called "DarkSend" when they were known as Darkcoin but changed PrivateSend after rebranding to Dash

MasterNode

Dash was first to use the Masternode system on the blockchain that allowed for their hybrid chain to use both Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus models, where PoW is used for miners verifying transactions and PoS used in the Masternodes that process higher tasks such as voting on governance and funding proposals and other operations like PrivateSend.

Masternodes are powerful servers backed by collateral held in Dash, and are designed to provide advanced services and governance on the blockchain. Dash has been associated with the concept of masternodes ever since the invention of this novel concept soon after the project started in 2014. Masternodes host full copies of the blockchain and provide a unique second layer of services to the network, facilitating advanced functions such as InstantSend, PrivateSend and usernames on the blockchain. Masternodes must be backed by collateral denominated in Dash, and in return their operators receive regular payment for the services they provide to the network. As highly committed custodians of the project, masternode operators are given the opportunity to vote each month on up to 10% of the block reward to fund community projects supporting the Dash ecosystem. -Dash.org

The Masternode system is so unique as it requires the collateral of 1000 DASH to be locked up to the network and cannot be spent without interrupting the Masternode. Masternode operators receive constant payments which incentivized users to run Masternodes and added benefits of voting on proposals an such.

Mining

While Dash has its PoS mechanism, they chose to have it still work with PoW mining and use the X11 mining algorithm. X11 was initially intended to be Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) resistant but we have since seen many X11 ASIC miners hit the market since.

The PoW mining is integrated as part of their two-tier network with Masternodes and splits block rewards. 45% goes to miners, 45% goes to Masternode operators, and 10% goes to the budget to payout proposal winners. A "superblock" that contains the entire 10% payout for the proposal is created every 16,616 blocks (30.29 days).

The block reward decreases more conservatively by 7.14% per year when compared to Bitcoin's 50%. Interestingly enough, Dash will decrease their rewards around the same time Bitcoin and others go through their block reward halving.

Read the Whitepaper for the full technical details of Dash.

Marketing

Dash has had one of the most interesting marketing for their coin since they went through a rebranding twice. Their marketing began taking off when they made their change to Dash and many in the crypto community are familiar with some of Dash's marketing campaigns.

One of the most notable marketing moves Dash has made was when they named crypto-journalist Amanda B. Johnson their official spokesperson. That's where we began to see her everywhere with Dash.

Johnson has since moved on to being the Supervisor-Secretary at the Dash Investment Foundation and co-hosting a podcast.

Growth

Dash continued with its growth with many projects and adoption in many regions. Back in March of 2019, an SMS-based Dash wallet service Dash Text launched a charity service for children in Venezuela.

According to Dash's official blog, Burger King Venezuela partnered with payment processor Cryptobuyer to accept DASH at its restaurants.

Dash Brazil announced back in December 2019 that ATAR Pay and Stratum Exchange are enabling payments in DASH in over 2.5 million merchants in Brazil.

Dash announced users can buy DASH with cash on a network of 11,000 ATMs in Mexico.

Dash also announced recently the release of their public testnet environment for their Dash Platform which is a technology stack for developing Decentralized Apps (DApps) on the Dash blockchain.

Dash Platform functionality will be released in several phases to Evonet. The testing phases, along with what will be tested in each phase, is outlined later in this post. Our initial efforts will begin with the foundational components of the platform: those that applications and developers will access. Later phases will expand our testing to include light client support, enhanced security functionality, and masternode rewards / incentives. Note that Dash Platform is not a product with which most users will directly interact. Instead, users will interact through client applications that have their own user interfaces, such as the DashPay application. -Dash Blog

Dash continues to grow in 2020. From starting off with a different name til now, It seems since Dash found their identity, they were able to push through and continue to show growth among the many coins on the market. With the latest launch of their Dash Platform, seeing more development is a positive sign as Dash is continuing to hold some ground being the #18 coin by market cap at the time of writing this.