Dash is one of the privacy-centric coins that also focuses its attention on improving transaction speed and real-life adoptions. Dash is an exciting project that has been growing fast, especially in developing countries with failing fiat currencies. With this article, we will explore the advantages of Dash and whether Dash coin is worth your money for long-term investment or not. Let’s begin!

DASH - Summary

Dash coin was created in 2014. At first, it was focused on improving privacy and untraceability. The main idea was to become another privacy-centric coin. However, after the coin rebranding from Darkcoin to Dash, slowly but surely, the main vision of the core team changed. From more about privacy-centric to more about peer-to-peer electronic cash.

It doesn’t mean that Dash does not promote and upgrade its privacy and untraceability features. Until today, PrivateSend (Dash’s private send feature) remains one of the biggest advantages of Dash. However, as you can see from the official website, Dash's main selling points nowadays are about speed and cheap transaction costs.

Dash recently has been gaining adoption in developing countries. For example, in Venezuela. There are undoubtedly a lot of problems in Venezuela, and the local fiat currency is going down big time. Many Venezuelans have started to look for alternatives to send money abroad, and one of those alternatives is Dash.

Besides Venezuela, of course, Dash is hoping to gain more adoptions in both developing and developed countries. In a report from Q2 2019, Dash team stated that the coin had been approved by more than 4800 merchants all over the world, and more than 150 brokers and exchanges.

This number is considered impressive, especially knowing that many higher market cap coins have smaller numbers of adoption rates. Dash also bragged about its ability to send money within less than 1 second.

Basically, Dash is a cryptocurrency that tries to solve the industry’s biggest problem. Adoption. And to achieve that goal, Dash keeps improving its speed and cheap transaction costs. At the present time, Dash is seen as one of the fastest cryptocurrencies, competing with the likes of NANO, XRP, XLM, TRX, and other speedy coins.

Dash’s technology uses a hashing algorithm called X11. This hashing algo utilizes a sequence of eleven scientific hashing for Proof of Work consensus mechanism. Dash also uses the concept of the master node to verify transactions speedier compared to standard cryptocurrencies.

The concept of the master node is needed in Dash to confirm PrivateSend and InstantSend features. By utilizing master nodes, InstantSend is able to send DASH transactions within just one second. They can achieve this speed because there are way fewer master nodes compared to standard nodes, so the transaction verification is much faster.

In order to become a master node, you need to stake 1000 DASH coins, which will be automatically locked. Computers who become master nodes will be able to get financial rewards considering their crucial roles in transaction verifications.

There are various factors to determine the economic reward for these master nodes, but usually, they will be able to get 45% of a block reward.

A Little Bit More About InstantSend And PrivateSend

image source

To understand Dash's unique selling points, we need to learn more about Dash’s biggest advantages compared to its competitors. They are the features called InstantSend and PrivateSend.

So, what are those features, exactly? InstantSend is a feature where you can easily send DASH coins instantly within a few seconds, sometimes even less than 1 second. To do this, the role of the master node is needed.

Whenever someone broadcasts his DASH coins on the blockchain using InstantSend feature, the transaction will be seen by a group of master nodes. The same master nodes will reach a consensus and verify the transaction.

By ignoring the masses (normal nodes), you can easily “confirm” an InstantSend transaction thanks to the presence of the master nodes.

Apart from confirming InstantSend transactions, master nodes also have the responsibility to confirm PrivateSend transactions. Just like with InstantSend, the PrivateSend transactions “skip” the normal nodes and interact directly with the master nodes.

The transactions inside PrivateSend are broken down to discrete denominations like 0.1 DASH, 1 DASH, 10 DASH, or 0.01 DASH. Then, each PrivateSend transaction will be mixed with two other PrivateSend transactions. The master nodes will “mix” all the denominations from 3 PrivateSend transactions.

The hope is that, by mixing all of these denominations from multiple transactions, the transaction will be untraceable. Different from InstantSend, PrivateSend requires more time to be confirmed by the blockchain.

Both InstantSend and PrivateSend are the unique features that make DASH unique compared to other blockchain platforms. Of course, there are cryptocurrencies that are as fast as DASH, and there are other cryptocurrencies that can also send untraceable transactions. But, to have both options at the same time? That’s not very common.

Analyzing DASH Team

As I have mentioned in my other articles, to invest in a cryptocurrency means to invest in the team. This is very important because many cryptocurrencies promise certain features in their roadmap. And more often than not, cryptocurrency traders and investors put their faith in the team’s words.

So, how about the DASH team? The team behind this coin is called the Dash Core Group. Ryan Taylor acts as the CEO of Dash Core Group. Andy Freer is the CTO, Fernando Gutierrez is the CMO, and Evan Duffield is the Strategy Advisor.

The team looks solid and has a strong background history. The CEO (Ryan Taylor) was the engagement manager and associate principal at McKinsey & Company. He was also the owner of Inaltair, LLC, equity research and due diligence service company.

Despite a strong background, actually, Dash Core Group is not free from controversies. Back during Dash’s earliest days, there was the controversy where 1.9 million coins were insta-mined. 10% of the total supply was created within just two days.

Evan Duffield, co-founder of Dash, made a public statement that the instamine happened because of a bug in the Litecoin forked code. The coin itself successfully regained their popularity sometime later even though the core team rejected some proposals to “fix” the instamine problem.



Not only that, recently Dash was hit by another big controversy where a Dash core senior advisor disappeared with investor funds.

For your information, Dash was known as Darkcoin. And before the coin was rebranded to Dash, it was basically a fork of litecoin v0.8.6.2 with an additional feature from Peercoin called checkpointsync-code was inserted into the script.

DASH Future And Potential Roadblocks

image source

Dash is a cross-border coin with a strong future. It has been adopted by a lot of different retailers in different countries. Its adoption rate in South America, especially in Venezuela, is particularly strong. While Dash receives strong competition from other fast coins, but it looks like they already have a strong start and first-mover advantage.

There are, of course, potential roadblocks for Dash’s future. The biggest problem is if bigger corporations and institutions adopt other fast coins. Ripple’s XRP is trying to be “widely adopted” by banks and financial institutions. Stellar is also entering the game with IBM Blockchain World Wire.

There are other dark horses like NANO, Litecoin, TRX, and others. Basically, every fast coin that can be used in cross-border transactions has the potential to become the biggest competitor to Dash. Because at the present time, Dash’s main slogan is to be used as digital cash that you can spend anywhere.

Dash Adoptions

image source

As we have mentioned above, Dash has been accepted by more than 4800 merchants. The adoption rate is considered higher than the average crypto adoptions. You can also check Dash’s official where to spend page on seeing which merchants and websites can actually accept Dash coins.

Some of the websites that accept Dash are Travala, NordVPN, CheapAir.com, eGifter, and Dash Giftcard Store. In Venezuela and neighboring countries (i.e. Colombia), you can also find some retail stores and restaurants where they state you can pay with Dash coins.

There are some multiple videos on YouTube where you can see customers paying their fried chickens or coffee with Dash coins in Venezuela. In Medellin, Colombia, there are also some coffee shops and restaurants that accept Dash payments. Typically you can find them in more touristic areas.

External Factor That Can Affect Dash Price

image source

So, we have learned all the good things about Dash coin. But is it enough to make our decision? Unfortunately, not. Talking about cryptocurrencies is not as simple as talking about the fundamentals of each specific coin.

Until today, the price actions of most altcoins are still affected by Bitcoin. So, when Bitcoin is having a good time, most likely, altcoins would also go up. When Bitcoin is having a bad week or month, altcoin prices usually go down even further.

This theory also affects Dash. So, even though Dash has good and strong fundamentals, but Dash won’t be able to move independently. It is still affected by Bitcoin’s price action, whether we like it or not.

And talking about Bitcoin's price, there are opposite views on whether Bitcoin will go upward or downward in 2020. Some analysts predict Bitcoin will go up in 2020 following Bitcoin’s mining halving reward event somewhere in the middle of next year.

However, there are also skeptics who believe the next year’s halving would be different from 2016. They said there would be no upward movement this time as most big traders have already “predicted” the event since the beginning of this year.

Which theory would be proven true? Nobody knows the future. One thing, though. Bitcoin price next year will be one of the biggest factors in the Dash price against fiat currencies. Make sure not to ignore the Bitcoin price.

Conclusion

Dash has strong fundamentals. It is fast, and its privacy feature is amazing. The future is decent for this coin, and it’s not a bad decision to invest in Dash. That being said, some controversies that we mentioned above should be taken into your consideration as well. Overall, Dash technology is awesome, but the coin is not far from controversies.