Dash (DASH) is a cryptocurrency targeting the digital cash use case designed to offer everyone financial freedom. The payments-focused coin continues to see increased adoption as it facilitates the sending and receiving of payments swiftly and securely with near-zero fees.  

Since it launched in 2014, the crypto has seen steady growth in value, hitting an all-time high of $1540 in Dec 2017 according to CoinMarketCap. 

Dash developers built this coin based on the blockchain tech deployed by Bitcoin. However, it offers advanced functionality such as much higher transaction speeds than Bitcoin because it leverages a unique model that involves masternodes, incentivized nodes which perform special functions for the network.

Another improvement on Bitcoin is that Dash transactions can optionally be mixed making all coins equal and fungible and more difficult to trace, making them safe for consumers to use to purchase goods and services without sensitive data exposure.

The popular payments coin boasts a self-funding model that enables the network to fund any necessary improvements on the Dash technology. It also has a self-governing model that makes for a truly decentralized experience for users who can vote on any upgrades/alterations to the network’s core functionality, as well as funding projects and initiatives.

Dash has introduced a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) mechanism that allows users to vote on critical decisions that determine the project’s direction.  

Dash Has the Edge Over Other Cryptocurrencies

Dash integrates a host of powerful features that give it an edge over other crypto assets such as Bitcoin and Litecoin. 

For one, the Dash cryptocurrency blockchain builds on the bitcoin system to introduce masternodes that complement miners’ work. The growing team of Dash masternodes is primarily responsible for enhancing the network’s security and facilitating transaction mixing (PrivateSend). 

This PrivateSend service enhances privacy in the Dash ecosystem, making it difficult to track transactions or find out users’ identities and balances, protecting them from risk of becoming a target for criminal activity such as theft and extortion. This feature is built into network infrastructure itself and is a massive advantage that Dash offers over the completely public Bitcoin ecosystem, which must rely on third-party services to protect consumers.

The network also rewards masternodes for ensuring that Dash transactions are as instant as cash transactions (InstantSend). Masternodes are also in charge of the governance and treasury system.

Dash solves the inherent problem of wide consumer adoption of Bitcoin with its InstantSend feature. It takes about 10 minutes for a BTC transaction to get confirmed under ideal circumstances, an issue that threatens to derail the mass adoption of the top crypto for everyday payments. 

On the other hand, Dash transactions are almost instant; on average, a transaction is confirmed by the masternode network in under 2 seconds using InstantSend, with a transaction becoming entirely permanent and irreversible within about 2.5 minutes thanks to the ChainLocks advanced security feature

Therefore, Dash improves on the Bitcoin network’s scalability by prioritizing on-chain scaling facilitated by a seamless and fully-incentivized infrastructure, with university research conducted specially for Dash showing that the network can handle transaction loads comparable to what modern payment networks such as VISA can handle today.

Why You Should Invest in the Dash Cryptocurrency

The price of Dash has skyrocketed by almost 40% in the last week, making it one of the best performing crypto assets at the moment. 

As a result of that surge, Dash currently has a market cap of over $1.6 billion as per data from CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing, the top payments-focused coin is up 11.3% to trade at $232.

               DASH/USD Chart By TradingView

The recent spike in the DASH/USD pair has excited the crypto community on Twitter, with one user calling for the price to soar as high as $1,000. 

Per the latest report from the Dash Core Group, the Dash cryptocurrency posted impressive growth in 2020. The blockchain network saw the total volume of payments reach $916 million, up 80% from 2019.

The Q4 2020 results highlighted a massive growth in average trade volumes from $9.8M to $37.4M, representing a 282% year-over-year jump. Commercial payment values on the Dash network also saw a tremendous increase, soaring 37.3% year-over-year and surpassing 22,000 transactions per day.

Dash Core Group also revealed that Dash adoption as a digital payment method across retail stores was rising. They noted that the payments coin outperformed BTC in terms of the number of retailers accepting digital payments in the US in January. 

Enhanced merchant adoption, along with the current strong market and technical fundamentals, make Dash one of the most lucrative crypto investments to keep an eye on in 2021.