Dash Review Analysis Report: Simple & Detailed
Dash Review Analysis
The Dash review analysis report is a result of our through and meticulous research, carried out by our dedicated team.
We certainly hope that you would find it useful.
We have categorized our analysis and review on a number of parameters. And we break each one in detail in order to provide you the best at one single point.
So without further ado, lets jump right into it.!
OVERVIEW
Dash or Digital Cash–as they like to call it–was originally released as XCoin (XCO) on the 18th of January 2014. Later, on February 28, the name was changed to Darkcoin, which further went on to get rebranded into Dash (DASH), on 25th of March 2015. The word Dash is a portmanteau of "Digital Cash”.
Dash came into existence as a fork of Bitcoin and hence it had a very similar code structure, as that of Bitcoin. Nevertheless, with continues developments and ever increasing developer community, Dash has turned into a worthy alternative to Bitcoin, with precise focus on “privacy”, “faster transactions”, and to ultimately make “accessibility & ease of use” of digital cash streamlined for all users. The biggest USP of Dash is that it allows the transacting parties to remain anonymous, very similar to cash transactions.
Dash utilizes a 2-tier network, of which, the first tier is similar to Bitcoin where miners create blocks. While the second tier is consisted of “Master Nodes”, which require a 1000 DASH as collateral, to perform specific governance functions such as PrivateSend and InstantSend.
PAIN/PROBLEM ADDRESSED
Dash is trying to address the following problems:
Instant Transactions:
Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin has been steadily gaining popularity and is being adopted continuously by many merchants, even as we speak. Although, Bitcoin has been greatly successful till now, it does have a significant disadvantage over its biggest competitor, the credit cards.
While processing point-of-sale transactions, credit cards can have nearly instantaneous authorization of payment, whereas to get finality in a Bitcoin transaction one must wait for blockchain confirmation to occur.
With Credit Cards, an authority is contacted to, when making a purchase that results in a buyer’s money being held until it clears later. In contrast to that, Bitcoin clients blindly propagate messages they believe are correct while getting no feedback from the network.
Dash overcomes these Bitcoin shortcomings and also competes well with the likes of Credit cards and Pay Pal in this aspect.
Dash transactions are almost instantly confirmed by the Masternodes network & hence payments are received almost instantly by the other party, thanks to the InstantX technology. This is a great improvement on Bitcoin’s system, where confirmations take much longer because all the work is done by the miners.
Privacy in Transactions:
With Bitcoin, transactions are published to the blockchain and you can prove who made them or to whom, but with Dash the anonymization technology makes it impossible to trace them. This is important because the blockchain is accessible to anyone with an internet connection–a significant drawback for those don’t wish their transaction history and balances to be publicly available. Dash does this through a mixing protocol utilizing an innovative decentralized network of servers called Masternodes, avoiding the need for a trusted third party that could compromise the integrity of the system.
Decentralized Governance:
As an open source project, Bitcoin lacks a developer funding model, which leaves the development to be managed by volunteers or powerful investor groups. Bitcoin also lacks a coherent governance mechanism that would allow for protocol changes to be easily agreed on and implemented. The blockchain data validation is managed by low end-nodes on a voluntary basis, and there’s no financial incentive to upgrade to the latest hardware and software.
On the other hand, Dash has a self-sustainable Decentralized Governance. While Masternodes are incentivized and can govern the blockchain with 1 vote per Masternode, the Dash blockchain is also self-funded. A portion of each block—currently 10%–is allocated to the Network Development and Promotion Budget. This means Dash developers and promoters receive payments for their contributions, unlike Bitcoin where contributions are voluntary and un-incentivized.
Low Cost Transactions:
One of the major challenge for any Bitcoin user is the high transaction fees that they have to pay sometimes because the block are so congested that the only way to get your transaction processed is to pay a higher fee.
On the other hand transaction fees for Dash is very low, usually even free. Dash’s seven-day moving average for fees is $0.11 as on 4-June-2017, as reported by Dash News. The above chart gives the comparison of the transaction fees of the major crypto coins.
But recent comparison of average Transaction Fee (as on 19-Nov-2017) shows that Litecoin has slightly lower transaction fee than that of Dash.
Team Configuration
It is a very strong team and has proven experience of delivering highly effective innovations. They have displayed through professionals, time and again, with their continuous focus on improving Dash, rather than engaging in trolling contributors of other projects or engaging in Reddit fights.
But there have been lot of criticism on the Business Development part of the core team, as it has spent a substantial time and resources on relationship building with exchanges and other businesses, rather than channelling resources toward actual usage of the currency in the real world. Moreover, Business development team has been poor at establishing proper communication channels with the Masternode networks.
The initiative from Dash to form a Dash Community is very innovative and is working very well. People like Amanda Johnson are doing exceptional work of on-boarding people onto the Dash community, so that they understand how Dash works and how should it be used.
Having said that, one minor drawback is that their team lacks any superstar name in their advisory boards, which might inspire confidence on future directions of the project.
ICO DETAILS
Dash did not opt for an ICO, since ICO was not such a big craze during the time DASH was launched. Only few coins had gone for ICO during that period. Mastercoin did a token sales in July 2013 and Ethereum and Karmacoin in 2014.
Moreover Evan Duffield never liked the idea of ICO.
FUTURE ROADMAP
Dash had released a 3 year Roadmap in June 2017, while keeping the Dash Evolution Platform as one of their primary Key focus. The Roadmap details a phased implementation of its landmark product, a decentralized payments platform–designed to be completely secure, merchant and consumer friendly, globally accessible, instant, available on any computer or device, and with fees far cheaper than competing payment methods. Dash Evolution that has been under designing phase for more than a year and a half is set for a full public launch in June 2018. The Evolution Alpha Test release is scheduled for December 2017 for a select business partners. A limited set of Evolution functions will be deployed onto MainNet in February 2018, with the full release of Evolution scheduled for June 2018.
The user capacity will increase with each development stage. Dash plans to double the number of developers with each release. The developers will use each incremental release as a framework for more development. There are various new technologies needed to create such an experience, all of which will strengthen the infrastructure supporting the network to ensure it can handle the transaction loads and data storage needs of a mass market.
Evolution will join Dash’s comprehensive list of upgrades that will allow the protocol to handle hundreds of millions of on-chain transactions a day, confirmed within a few seconds.
Dash plans to enable a high volume of transactions at physical points of sale, on devices, and through online transfers simultaneously through a Proof of Service masternode model and with the assistance of Dash-specific hardware chips capable of processing orders of magnitude faster than general-purpose computing platforms. The hardware project will be spearheaded by Dash’s new scientific and research branch, Dash Labs, led by CTO Andy Freer and Founder & Senior Advisor Evan Duffield.
Masternodes will be tested using “state transitions”. The system will give a mathematically predictable way to determine the quality of masternode service. Masternodes falling below a threshold of activity will be removed from the masternode list under a new system called “Masternode Blocks”.
Dash will reduce mining imbalances seen in other Proof of Work networks and enable enhanced on-chain scaling because their system provides compensation for running the hardware needed to service the network. Masternodes will become more powerful over time, and the incentive model ensures that as Dash grows and the need for sophisticated hardware grows, providers are paid accordingly for their service.
Dash’s hardware ambitions are due to arrive in the year 2020, with plans to put masternode hardware on individual chips, allowing each masternode to scale to the point where they may occupy their own data center.
To summarize, Dash Evolution will dramatically improve the experience of using a digital currency. Their aim is to make it consumer friendly and to tear down the barriers to adoption for both merchants and consumers so that any person can use digital currency everyday and for almost any purpose. Moreover, Evolution will be incredibly inexpensive, with no cross-border fees or restrictions. It will compete with PayPal and Venmo, and looks very ambitious if we look to the amount of transactions they want to handle eventually.
TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS
In its 3 year roadmap–shared in June 2017, Dash announced that Evolution will join Dash’s comprehensive list of upgrades that will allow the protocol to handle hundreds of millions of on-chain transactions a day, confirmed within a few seconds.
Dash plans to enable high volume of transactions at physical points of sale, on devices, and through online transfers , simultaneously through a Proof of Service masternode model and with the assistance of Dash-specific hardware chips capable of processing orders of magnitude faster than general-purpose computing platforms. The hardware project will be spearheaded by Dash’s new scientific and research branch, Dash Labs, led by CTO Andy Freer and Founder & Senior Advisor Evan Duffield.
Dash will reduce mining imbalances seen in other Proof of Work networks and enable enhanced on-chain scaling because their system provides compensation for running the hardware needed to service the network. Masternodes will become more powerful over time, and the incentive model ensures that as Dash grows and the need for sophisticated hardware grows, providers are paid accordingly for their service.
Dash’s hardware ambitions are due to arrive in the year 2020, with plans to put masternode hardware on individual chips, allowing each masternode to scale to the point where they may occupy their own data center.
Dash is focused on achieving the technological advancements it has promised as part of the Evolution Roadmap by preparing a star team by hiring dozens of the world’s best programmers, researchers, project managers, technologists, and user experience experts.
MARKETING STRATEGY
Dash has one of the strongest ongoing marketing campaigns of any cryptocurrency on the market currently. They manage this because of the proposal and treasury system and the high price of Dash, which results in a chunky marketing budget.
There is an in-house marketing team which focuses more on the long-term development of Dash called the Business Development Blog and of course there is also Amanda B Johnson, who has a weekly update on all the happenings of Dash. Marketing towards more mainstream users will probably take place once evolution is fully released.
The Dash community is broad and vibrant, which could be called a “grassroots movement” that wants to build a fair world money. Some are doing it for money but others are doing it for ideological reasons. You can connect with the Dash Community on the Dash Slack and Dash Sub Reddit.
As part of their Marketing Strategy, the Dash Core team hired–in Sep 2017–Ogilvy and Mather, a leading global multi-channel advertising agency and marketing firm, for a professional rebranding and a digital advertising campaign consisting of strategy, creative development, production, and media management.
The main goal of the project is to begin approaching marketing and communication professionally to ensure they deliver a clear and relevant message to the market. The outcome of the project is to establish a solid basis to make Dash a powerful brand. There are several phases to the project toward achieving that goal. O&M will develop and propose a brand positioning for all future marketing communications.
The goal is to provide a conceptual framework for the brand and make it relevant for the audience. This framework will serve as an input into their logo, look & feel, artworks, guidelines and creatives.
PUBLIC OUTLOOK
In Bitcoin’s early days, one of its selling points was the ability to move money globally, with little to no fees. That is no longer the case, as the cost of moving Bitcoin can sometimes exceed the costs of PayPal and Western Union. Commerce companies are struggling to use Bitcoin for its intended purpose, as a currency, even as fees erode their profit margins. There have been instances where major retailers have moved away from Bitcoin. Social platform Yours Inc. has recently moved away from using Bitcoin as a payment method due to its high fees. Likewise, Irish gift card company Bitcart recently abandoned Bitcoin and now accepts payments exclusively in Dash. The company complained that fees and delays were damaging their business, so they chose Dash as a less expensive, instant way to receive money.
Digital currency for payments Dash announced on 21-Nov-2017 it has formed a partnership with KuvaCash to launch a program that is designed to solve Zimbabwe’s ballooning inflation, collapsing currency, and declining national economy. Dash revealed that starting in the second quarter of 2018, KuvaCash will roll out a cash replenishment model to instill confidence in residents, allowing them to cash out their digital currency into USD fiat at any time, reduce transaction fees, and provide enhanced financial security and liquidity.
Antiwar.com is an activist website initiated in 1995 dedicated to promoting freedom and ending the military-industrial complex. It was one of the earliest known charities to accept bitcoin donations back in 2012. In second week of Nov, Antiwar announced it will be expanding its acceptance of digital assets and will now accept bitcoin cash, zcash, and dash.
Bjork set crypto-payment options for her next album, Utopia, coming up on November 24. The album is available for purchase with Bitcoin, Litecoin, DASH and AudioCoin.
Dash has been has been listed on QRYPTOS, a crypto only trading platform, and crypto-fiat exchange QUOINEX, two trading platforms launched by Japanese fintech company QUOINE. The listing means Dash will be available for trade against the Japanese Yen, Hong Kong Dollar, the Singapore Dollar, the Euro, the US Dollar, the Australian Dollar, the Indonesian Rupiah, the Indian Rupee, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum – to a growing user base predominantly located in Southeast Asia.
Alt Thirty Six, a rising digital payments platform, has announced it will integrate the top digital currency for payments, Dash, as a method of transaction between consumers, merchants, suppliers and vendors in new retail sectors. For consumers, costs of transacting in Dash at the Point of Sale and online will be at no cost, similar to their traditional payment options. Merchants, vendors, and suppliers operating in Dash will benefit from dramatically reduced cash-handling costs and eliminate all card brand fees that amounted to $80 billion from US merchants in 2016.
At September’s Dash Conference 2017, the Dash team announced an integration with a Bitcoin debit card provider that will allow Dash to be used at any retailer that accepts Visa, both in-store and online. This effectively allows Dash to be spent at over 40 million merchants worldwide. Also, owners of Dash will be able to withdraw their funds, in cash, at any ATM in 210 countries around the world.
The above are some of the indicators of the widespread acceptance that Dash has been able to achieve in such short span of time. For the complete list of businesses accepting DASH worldwide you can see in the website DiscoverDash.
SENTIMENTAL CHALLENGES
Dash has been very open and transparent about all of their project plans, with the details of each and every step of the plan shared timely, in an open forum.
It is one of the very few projects in the cryptocurrency space, where we see such kind of the transparency and openness of the project. We are easily able to get the progress at regular intervals, be it in software development, hardware advancements, marketing or operational aspects.
INCUMBENT COMPETITION
Dash can been said to be competing with any digital money used to exchange agreed-upon value but at closer look we can say with confidence that Dash is far ahead against all other digital money that we have.
Many communities mention that Monero or Zcash are competitors to Dash. To be frank here, Dash is completely focussed mass adoption and building the bridges that will ensure that they achieve it. Monero and Zcash are about providing a completely anonymous record of transactional data.
On the other hand, Anonymity was a core offering of Dash in their initial stages, and while they still retain and continue development on the PrivateSend feature, the scope of Dash has grown considerably from then-on. They now provide much more than just anonymity, including instant transactions, an effective governance system, self-funded development, and are working on Evolution, which will provide much greater ease-of-use.
Then there are set of coins like PIVX and Exclusive Coin which are basically a copy of Dash or hardfork of Dash having Masternodes but they are nowhere near to Dash in having a goal of Mass adoption and working on that.
XEM is also one more digital currency which is similar to Dash but Dash excels here as well in the marketing of massive adoption. Dash can also said to be competing with big guns like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, now Bitcoin Gold etc.
With Bitcoin’s first mover advantage, Bitcoin has become a clear market leader. This makes for a skewed and unfair comparison with relatively newer one like Dash. But Dash with its unique features of faster and cheaper transactions with innovations like Masternodes, Bnstantsend & Self-Funded Blockchain are giving run for the money to big-guns like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash.
CURRENT POSITION
Dash version 12.1 release:
As per the plan, the release of Dash version 12.1 has been completed. The Core developer team focused on deploying Dash 12.1, which links existing Dash codebase with the future Evolution releases.
DashPay Wallet Alpha, September 2017:
The Dash version of the Copay wallet, the base for the Evolution wallet, has entered its alpha testing's phase as planned in Sept 2017. The Dash Evolution team worked on a Dash version of this wallet, titled Dashpay, as a base for the Evolution upgrade, which will give a clean user-friendly experience and allow some advanced functions such as joint accounts, savings accounts, private cash accounts, recurring payments, and more.
Dash version 12.2 release:
The release of Dash version 12.2 completed in Nov first week though it was targeted for Sept 2017 in the roadmap of Dash Evolution. 2MB block size increase was targeted for completion in Nov 2017 and it was completed on time along with DashCore 12.2 Release.
The most notable changes ins Dash version 12.2 release are:
1- DIP0001 implementation (which is a 2MB block upgrade); 2- Transaction fee reduction 10x (activates via DIP0001 activation); 3- InstantSend vulnerability fix (activates via DIP0001 lock in); 4- PrivateSend improvement which should allow user to have mixed funds available much faster; 5- Various RPC changes; 6- Lots of back-ports from Bitcoin Core and refactoring of our own legacy code which should improve performance and make code more reliable and easier to review; 7- Experimental HD wallet with BIP39/BIP44 support.
This upgrade reduces Dash’s transaction fees to near zero, while doubling its network capacity. Regular Dash transactions will now cost less than a cent, and their InstantSend transactions, which confirm online or at the point of sale in less than two seconds, will be reduced to a remarkably low 2.8 cents each (0.0001 x current Dash price), according to a statement. InstantSend transactions historically cost 0.001 Dash or 28 cents.
This network upgrade will cut costs by a factor of ten. Dash's new software rollout will also increase the network's maximum block size from 1Mb to 2Mb, allowing for about 48 transactions to confirm every second, compared to Bitcoin's seven. This makes Dash transactions 215 times cheaper than Bitcoin and 8x the capacity of Bitcoin.
Thus version12.2 release reinforces the Dash Core Group's commitment to maintaining a network that is fast, high-capacity, secure, inexpensive, and easy to integrate and use.
In addition to Roadmap, two proposals have been funded to make DASH more attractive. They are Amanda B. Johnson’s new mass market project, and Dash Force‘s DiscoverDash initiative.
Switching gears from her previous weekly video project Dash: Detailed, Amanda B. Johnson launched a new video project aimed at mass market adoption. This project includes contests and giveaways via social media hashtags to incentivize growing global attention on the Dash economy.
A project of the Dash Force, DiscoverDash is a new merchant adoption and listing site. It contains the list of businesses accepting DASH worldwide. In addition to business listings, DiscoverDash features resources and guides to facilitate new users and business owners joining the Dash economy.
The site aims to be a one-stop shop for Dash adoption, providing basic info, guides, lists of preferred merchant tools, etc., as well as best practices to approaching businesses to integrate Dash and much more.
Dash is very clear and elaborate roadmap with significant progress made and as per the planned schedule. The entire progress report is very transparent in the read-only/view-only portal for project documentation that is open to the entire community.
Evolution is a massive endeavor with gigantic promises, but Dash is focussed to accomplish their goals through the help of an All-Star team of dozens of the world’s best programmers, researchers, project managers, technologists, and user experience experts. They are working every day to ensure that Evolution will be a superior payments option embraced by millions.
PROs & CONs
Information Sources
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