What is Dash?

Since its creation in January 2014, Dash has added features such as:

Two-tier network with incentivized nodes and decentralized project governance (Masternodes)

Instantly settled payments (InstantSend)

Instantly immutable blockchain (ChainLocks)

Optional privacy (PrivateSend)

How does Dash work?

The Dash Network is governed by masternodes, servers backed by collateral held in Dash designed to provide advanced services securely and governance over Dash's proposal system. In exchange for part of the block reward, masternodes provide a second layer of services to the network. They facilitate functions such as InstantSend, PrivateSend, and ChainLocks, which reportedly protect Dash against 51% mining attacks.

Dash governance system, or treasury, distributes 10% of the block rewards for the development of the project in a competitive and decentralized way. This has allowed the creation of many funded organizations, including Dash Core Group, Inc. (DCG), which supports continued development, integrations, and other activities of Dash.

Within the first 48 hours of Dash's launch, approximately 2.0 million coins were mined, which significantly exceeded the planned emission schedule. Dash was originally forked from Litecoin, and although Litecoin suffered a similar issue at its launch due to a bug in its difficulty adjustment algorithm, this was not widely understood at the time of Dash's launch. Excluding the first two Litecoin blocks (which were mined prior to release), coin emission during the first 24 hours was elevated resulting in the creation of 500,000 Litecoin in the first 24 hours. While it is well-documented that Dash inherited the bug from Litecoin, there has nonetheless been widespread speculation about whether the resulting fastmine was intentional to benefit early miners.

Many individuals competed for block rewards at launch, similar to other projects launching at that time. In the subsequent years, Dash has been actively traded on exchanges through several market cycles, which today makes it one of the most well-distributed cryptocurrencies, according to Google Cloud.