Still “afloat”: what is known about the Dash (DASH) cryptocurrency?
At the end of 2017, at the peak of the so-called "crypto boom," Dash was among the top 10 leading projects in the digital asset market by capitalization. Over time, the Dash protocol gave way to promising new projects but maintained its position among the significant privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies.
The path to decentralization
In May 2024, the Dash team announced that it was ready to make the project decentralized and recover from the negative wave of delistings from centralized crypto exchanges (CEX). From 2022 to 2024, DASH cryptocurrencies were removed from large and well-known trading platforms such as:
- OKX,
- Huobi Global,
- Bittrex,
- ShapeShift and several others.
These events negatively impacted the price dynamics of DASH, causing a wave of selling and damaging the entire ecosystem in the long run, as investors began to fear that this trend would continue. Nevertheless, the DASH cryptocurrency continues to be traded on leading platforms such as:
- Binance,
- Coinbase,
- Kraken,
- KuCoin.
In 2023, the Dash team has already made the first step towards decentralization by voting — they changed the model of issue distribution among the ecosystem participants, and now it looks as follows:
- 60% — rewards to holders of nodes (validator nodes);
- 20% — rewards to miners;
- 20% — budget of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that participates in the management of the ecosystem with a voting pool.
Dash Platform release
In the summer of 2024, an organization called Dash Core Group (DCG), dedicated to supporting and developing the Dash ecosystem, announced the release of a Web3 technology stack called the Dash Platform. This platform was created to establish Web3 applications (DApps) on the Dash blockchain network.
The release of the new platform has made the Dash protocol part of the global decentralized finance (DeFi) marketplace . In other words, thanks to the Dash Platform, the underlying protocol is no longer just a blockchain network but a truly autonomous platform that can provide financial services to users and investors in a fully decentralized environment.
The Dash Platform release is part of the Evolution update activated on the Dash network in 2019. The main goal of Evolution is to simplify the user experience for regular transactions. Moreover, the very concept of creating a cryptocurrency "so convenient that even a grandmother could use it" was developed by Dash founder Evan Duffield himself back in 2015.
The Dash Platform is still in its early stages, and the team has yet to add or improve several key features and elements of the platform, such as:
- The Dash Platform Name Service (DPNS) is an analog of the Ethereum Domain Name Service (ENS), only for the Dash blockchain;
- Withdrawals. According to Dash Core Group CTO Sam Wistrich, this feature has not yet been activated and will only start working if the team is confident in its stability. For example, this factor especially concerns double spending: in Dash Platform, there are special units — so-called "credits," which are tied to the DASH altcoin in the ratio of 1000 to 1;
- The State Sync function allows for quick synchronization of nodes (network nodes). The function itself has already been implemented, but the developers still have a lot of work to do to optimize it;
- Addition of interchangeable tokens (FT). One of the essential features of the DeFi marketplace is the ability to issue tokens based on any blockchain, such as Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, or Solana. This allows issuers to leverage their digital assets across multiple decentralized ecosystems, thereby attracting additional liquidity to their own. Support for interchangeable tokens is still in development, but developers have already laid the groundwork in the previously launched platform;
- Smart contracts. Back in July, Wistrich mentioned that the Dash Platform plans to support smart contracts, and work on this is expected to begin as early as late 2024.
Dash statistics and market performance
According to CoinMarketCap, in December 2024, the market capitalization of Dash was $531 million, and over the past year, it has grown by 43% — from $369 million. According to this indicator, the altcoin ranks 157th in the overall ranking of cryptocurrencies.
The value of the DASH cryptocurrency has grown by almost 40% over the same period — from $31.8 to $44.4, having already reached a two-year high. In May 2024, the value of the altcoin reached $58.4 but soon corrected, like most digital assets on the market, due to the general negative background.
The number of active addresses in the Dash blockchain network also shows positive dynamics. According to the analytical service Messari, it passed 100,000 in the same year and reached a new one-year high.