This week has been another fabulous week for Dash with some awesome news developments! Continue reading to get a summary of the week!

Dash Integrations of the Week:

KFC in Venezuela Integrates Dash: A KFC restaurant in Caracas, Venezuela will begin to accept Dash payments next week and will then rollout the integration into 24 other chain locations in the country. The integration was spear-headed by Alejandro Echeverría, of Dash Help, Dash Merchant Venezuela and Dash Text and highlights the success that Dash has had with merchant adoption in Venezuela since over 2,400 merchants currently accept Dash. Venezuelans are suffering from horrific hyperinflation and Dash is trying to provide them with the technology to help escape the terrible economic conditions caused by the inflationary bolivar.

Singaporean Exchange, DigiFinex, Lists Dash: The 5th ranked cryptocurrency exchange with 1 million registered users with over 100,000 DAUs has listed Dash as BTC, ETH, and USDT pairs. The integrations expands Dash liquidity and offers more on-ramps for individuals to get involved in the Dash ecosystem. The integration, especially, in a bear market signals strong confidence in Dash by these exchanges and their consumers.

Mongolian Exchange, IDAX, Lists Dash: The 11th ranked cryptocurrency exchange will be launching Dash as a BTC pair and will be offering a 50% fee wavier for the first month. IDAX claims to separate itself from competitors via its “secure technology protection, convenient and smooth transactions, strict currency checking, national policy support, and fixed asset support”. IDAX also claims more than one million registered users and $326+ million in 24-hour trading volume. The integration further singles rising confidence in the Dash network by enabling more individuals to enter the Dash ecosystem.

Dash Developments of the Week:

Dash to Implement Automatic InstantSend, Breaks Merchant Adoption Barrier: With the 0.13 version upgrade, Dash will now securely lock all simple transactions (4 inputs or less) automatically for no additional fee. This provides Dash a significant advantage in merchant adoption since other coins may have to wait 10 minutes or more to get one confirmation to be secure. This plus the implementation of ChainLocks and LLMQs in 0.14 makes Dash one of the most secure and spendable cryptocurrencies on the market. Dash will have even more competitive advantages to appeal to merchants, which has already enabled Dash to gain over 4,000 merchants around the world.

CrowdNode Launches 11th Pooled Masternode: The popular Dash Masternode pooling service has seen net deposits around 100 Dash per day since their launch to now have 11 pooled Dash Masternodes. CrowdNode highlighted how they have see strong confidence in Dash and their service despite the large exchange price declines. They also have plans to implements shared voting solutions so pooled Masternode owners can still cast their percentage votes on Dash DAO Treasury proposals. Overall, CrowdNode’s success demonstrates how consumers still have confidence in Dash, makes Dash Masternode ownership more accessible, and contributes to Dash’s more equitable wealth distribution.

Dash Community Outreach of the Week:

Dash Force Meetup Contest Winners – November: Last month’s meetups were a great success with 955 wallets set up across 11 meetups. They were held in Russia, Venezuela and Africa and all were featured on meetup.com, Facebook, Twitter, and Evernote. Check it out to see who won some Dash and how you can hold your own meetup!

Dash Outreach in Turkey Promises Economic Relief and Sparks Interest: Dash Embassy D-A-CH recently visited Ankara, Turkey for the Blockchain TR Summit where they gave entry-level talks to Turkish business community and government members. There were also members from cryptocurrency exchanges, such as Turkish-based Paribu and Swiss-based Lykke. Their discussions of how Dash functions spurred interest from locals to start their own cryptocurrency communities, as well as Paribu wanting to integrate Dash.

General News of the Week:

Roger Ver Speaks Highly of Dash: Roger Ver recently hosted a Q&A with Corbin Fraser and Mate Tokay where they spoke highly of Dash when prompted by a listener’s question. Roger said “you could argue that Dash is basically trying to do what Bitcoin was trying to do from day one, but they actually want it to be cash” and that he “loves Dash as well”. The conversation helps illustrate how Dash appeals to a wide range of individuals by accomplishing cryptocurrency’s original goals of peer-to-peer, decentralized, digital currency.

Overstock CEO Believes in Potential of Blockchain: Patrick Byrne recently said in an interview that “the blockchain revolution has a greater potential than anything we’ve seen in history”. He has invested heavily in blockchain technology through Overstock’s subsidiary of Medici Ventures and he also plans to sell off the retail arm of Overstock.com early next year to focus more on blockchain. Dash has been taking significant steps towards this revolution by constantly working on technological improvements like Automatic InstantSend and ChainLocks, as well as merchant adoption to make cryptocurrency usable in everyday life.

Freelancers Favor Cryptocurrency: A new study has revealed that 29% of Freelances favor being paid in cryptocurrency. Of the 1,100 freelancers surveyed, 18% preferred for all of their payments to be in cryptocurrency, while 11% preferred only some of their payments in cryptocurrency. The preference makes sense since old world financial transfers take a significant portion of freelancers’ income. A major barrier, however, is wider cryptocurrency acceptance so freelancers can directly spend their income, which Dash has been working hard to improve.

US Government Researches Ways to Track Privacy Coins: The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program recently issued a pre-solicitation document to create a framework to effectively track privacy-based cryptocurrencies. The document specifically named Monero and Zcash, stating a need to keep up with technological advancements. The document did not mention Dash, which has often, incorrectly, been lumped together with Monero and Zcash as privacy coins. Dash’s PrivateSend is optional and only mixes transaction data, but still stores everything on the blockchain.

Marriott Hotels Expose 500 Million Guests’ Data: The hack is one of the biggest in history and exposed guests’ names, date of birth, mailing address, passport numbers, payment information and more. This event demonstrate the need for secure payment methods that allow users to control their own data. Dash is working hard to achieve this security, and offer additional security with PrivateSend, while also enabling Dash to be spendable in everyday transactions.

Dash Media of the Week:

Dash Podcast Interview with Sam Barbosa: This week, the three amigos chat with Dash Core Group android developer, Sam Barbosa. Make sure to check it out to find out all the cool things happening in Dash development!

Dash Force News Rebrands: Meet the new name of your #1 source for Dash News – Dash News! Dash Force News has officially rebranded as Dash News to get a new clean look! Make sure to follow all of our social media outlets to get the latest updates.

As Dashcember moves along, Dash is productively building future infrastructure with new developments, integrations and announcements! We hope that our content and coverage was very informative and enjoyable this week and we cannot wait to see what awesome Dash News awaits us next week!