Three times in a week: Dash officials summarize five reasons for DASH's outstanding performance.

Written by: 0xjs@Jinse Finance

Dash has recently performed exceptionally well.

Within 7 days, the price of DASH rose steadily from $41, remaining unaffected even by the sharp drop on November 3rd. On November 4th, DASH peaked at nearly $140, more than three times its original price.

Why has Dash performed so well recently?

Dash officially summarized the reasons, stating that this was not an overnight success, but rather the result of five major achievements over the past few years.

1. DashSpend

First, DashSpend was released.

DashSpend demo at Starbucks McCafé

This feature, offering significant discounts, was previously a standalone app called DashDirect, but that app ceased operation several years ago. Now, users can use Dash directly in their wallets to make purchases at hundreds of thousands of merchants.

2. Bill Payment Issues

Secondly, we delved into the bill payment issue.

Thanks to Spritz Finance, Zypto, and Swapin. It is estimated that 3 billion people worldwide could potentially use Dash to pay at least a portion of their bills.

“Project Three Billlion”: Dash is ready for global rollout

Three billion people.

That's roughly how many people we can get living in a decentralized currency system.

Not tomorrow, not ten years from now. It's today.

First, a brief background.

Dash's killer app: Cryptocurrency spending

Dash is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies. For ten years, we have been dedicated to providing a decentralized digital currency that is private, instant, affordable, secure, and easy to use. It runs reliably and stably. During this time, we have continuously refined and improved our technology, fully preparing for true mass adoption. Now, that moment is approaching.

But fundamentally changing the world's reliance on fiat currencies and the banking system is no easy task. It requires fundamentally rebuilding the global economic infrastructure, or in the meantime, establishing new connections with the old system. And we have done it.

If you download the DashPay wallet, you can see for yourself how Dash makes paying for real-world goods and services easy and convenient, while also offering significant discounts. Now that we've done that, we finally have the necessary start-up capital to tackle the most challenging problem: bills. The hardest hurdle to overcome: bills. Over the years, we've seen all sorts of goods and services exchanged for cryptocurrency: pizza, alpaca socks, VPNs, dubious items on the dark web, and more. We've also seen prepaid debit cards, digital gift card providers, and others act as intermediaries, helping people use cryptocurrency as currency. Unfortunately, the most important aspect of living entirely in cryptocurrency—paying bills—is also one of the most complex. This is because bills are typically tied to personal identities and accounts (rather than anonymous goods or services that can be purchased with cash), meaning there's a need to interface with traditional financial services institutions. And these institutions have historically been hostile to cryptocurrency. For a long time, Dash users in many countries have been able to purchase a wide variety of goods for small purchases, but they still primarily rely on banks to pay for their largest and most important expenses. This means that for some, Dash is a novelty; for a very small number of users who can create personalized local peer-to-peer economies, it is the true digital currency; but for global users, it is far from a mainstream currency. We are addressing the bill payment problem. This challenge has changed significantly in recent years. Thanks to the growing demand for cryptocurrency as a currency and the efforts of several innovative companies, many users worldwide are now able to pay all their bills with cryptocurrency: utilities, mortgages, rent, internet, phone bills, and more. These companies allow users to add current bill payers, pay with cryptocurrency, and then have them pay on their behalf. Moreover, all these premium services accept Dash. The most mature of these is Swapin, which allows Europeans using the euro to seamlessly pay their bills with Dash. Bitrefill covers El Salvador. Spritz has extended this support to the US. Zypto allows users in multiple countries and regions, including the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Egypt, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Malaysia, to use Dash to pay their bills. It's worth noting that in some regions, such as the United States, Dash has established redundancy mechanisms with multiple bill payment service providers, so even if one company experiences a failure, users still have a backup plan. It's also worth noting that all these services are non-custodial, meaning users do not bear the risk of fund custody and can use a wallet they control to make payments. 3. Improving Privacy Payment Functionality Third, we are comprehensively improving the privacy payment functionality. This is an original feature launched by Dash in 2014, but we are making significant improvements to make it faster, more efficient, and more stable. We believe that privacy protection will flourish in 2025! Dash is comprehensively improving and simplifying its privacy features. In June 2024, the Dash DAO voted on an issue. The governance proposal aims to improve the confidentiality and security of user payments. The first step is to add support for Confidential Transactions (CT), which will bring a range of optimizations.

Background

Since its launch in 2014, Dash has been committed to continuing Bitcoin's original promise of permissionless digital cash use. One of the first improvements was the CoinJoin feature implemented at the protocol level. Enabling this feature effectively breaks down the transaction graph (the path between the sender and receiver), allowing users to transact with peace of mind, without worrying about their private financial information being leaked to their trading partners.

Over the years, Dash's CoinJoin feature has been continuously optimized, and all dedicated wallets support it. However, with technological advancements and evolving user needs, we are undertaking a major upgrade to make this feature more efficient, convenient, flexible, and easy to use.

New Chapter: Confidential Transactions

Dash will add support for Confidential Transactions (CT) in the near future, following the DAO's vote to move forward with this upgrade.

In short, CT hides transaction amounts and address balances. Therefore, while you can see the source and destination of a transaction, only the sender and receiver know the specific amount. If CT is adopted as the default standard by a wallet, ordinary users can immediately and seamlessly conduct transactions without worrying about their funds or the amount spent on goods/services being revealed, while maintaining transparent payment records on the blockchain for accounting purposes. CT (Confidentiality Technology) is a well-proven encryption technology and the foundation of many modern privacy solutions. Notably, it has recently been adopted by many major projects in the non-explicit privacy field, including Solana, PayPal, and Circle. CT is rapidly becoming the standard for confidentiality, and even the most stringent regulatory bodies acknowledge it as a fundamental guarantee for ensuring transaction security. What can CT technology do? Besides enhancing the privacy of ordinary users by hiding transaction amounts and balances, CT is also a first step towards many subsequent improvements. Specifically, it can significantly improve Dash's CoinJoin functionality. By hiding amounts, CoinJoin's process can be significantly simplified. Currently, funds are split into different denominations, and each denomination is mixed 4 to 16 times. This makes transactions difficult to track and increases the time and complexity of the process. With CT, amounts are hidden, meaning you don't need to split your balance into dozens of denominations or perform multiple mixing operations. This allows the background mixing process to take only seconds instead of minutes, greatly reducing the likelihood of users noticing it. Even if not all users mix different amounts of currency, hiding amounts removes an important data point for analytics. In the old system, if a user mixed a specific amount of currency and sent it to someone else, that amount might appear in future transaction records, potentially linking the transaction to existing records if the future recipient wasn't careful about privacy. But with transparent addresses, this data point disappears, meaning that even if future recipients aren't very privacy-conscious, the information available for analysis is greatly reduced. In short, CT provides a strong default standard for all Dash users, helping them protect sensitive financial information while unlocking new tools for users with advanced privacy preferences. While CT is a first step toward significant improvements to Dash's confidential payments, there are other relatively simple additional steps we can take to further enhance its effectiveness. First, we can implement Sietch, a technology pioneered by Hush. In short, Sietch sends some zero-value outputs in each transaction, making each payment appear as a multi-party payment. This technology was originally designed to fill the last gap in zero-knowledge cryptocurrencies like Zcash. While implementing Sietch in a completely transparent blockchain makes no sense (anyone could see which outputs didn't actually send any tokens), in Transparent Transactions (CT), outputs containing tokens and those not containing tokens are indistinguishable. It's worth noting that Sietch can be implemented at the wallet level, not the protocol level, so no changes are needed to Dash's codebase. Wallets that integrate Sietch and CT by default can provide Dash users with good instant transaction privacy without implementing any interactive features like CoinJoin. However, when Sietch is used in conjunction with CT and CoinJoin, we gain a very robust privacy solution: transaction amounts are hidden, the transaction graph is destroyed before and after the transaction, and multi-party and unilateral payments are indistinguishable. This provides Dash users with a powerful set of features to help them achieve their desired level of payment confidentiality while maintaining blockchain transparency and ensuring that the source and destination addresses of transactions are always traceable. Another potential improvement is enhancing network-level privacy protection to prevent malicious nodes from eavesdropping on transactions. One such improvement is… the Hawkweed Protocol, which effectively makes it as difficult as possible for cyber spies to know which node created a given transaction. Next Steps The first priority is to integrate CT support into the Dash protocol. Following that, we will add CT support to our own dedicated wallets and services and further optimize CoinJoin to be compatible with CT. Finally, we will seek out as many third-party wallets and services as possible within the broader Dash ecosystem to deploy CT, thereby providing the best possible user experience. A new era has arrived. Dash remains true to its original mission, committed to becoming the most efficient, convenient, and comprehensive confidential digital cash. Join us and bring it to the masses.

4. DEX Integration

Dash has been added to the Maya Protocol. Maya is a powerful cross-chain AMM DEX that supports decentralized Dash trading globally. It is the first DEX platform to integrate Dash (and therefore particularly special), but more features are coming soon.

5. Dash Evolution, Smart Contract Functionality

Finally, and most importantly: Dash Evolution.

Dash has released a brand new blockchain, Dash Evolution, at its core an advanced indexed database with proof functionality. This provides support for our username system, but its functionality goes far beyond that.

Evolution is a platform for executing data contracts. These contracts write data to an indexed and queryable decentralized storage.

Sidechains, running on the same nodes as the main chain, handle data transactions, while the network's decentralized API allows anyone to access this data on demand. This is ideal for any application that needs to store data in a decentralized manner and quickly search and access the data it needs. Examples include accounting software, business maps, social media, and any application that requires decentralized, censorship-resistant data storage and easy access to the data anytime, anywhere. This is an ambitious project. It's not just about adding a new set of features to Dash, but about launching a completely new and distinct blockchain network that will interface with the existing Dash network. Dash smart contract functionality will be available in 2026.