What is the Dash cryptocurrency and how does it work?

• Launch date: January 18, 2014
• Creator: Evan Duffield, an American programmer
• Name at launch: Xcoin
• Renamings: Darkcoin (2014) and DASH (2015)

Dash originated as a fork of Bitcoin. During the fork a glitch led to 1.8m DASH being mined in just two days (roughly 10% of the total supply).

According to Duffield, the cause was a coding error that incorrectly converted difficulty; the wrong value was then used to calculate rewards, resulting in an instamine.

One of the chief beneficiaries of the bug was the developer himself. Facing criticism, he proposed restarting the cryptocurrency, but users rejected the idea and the project continued in its original form.

DASH targets enhanced user privacy and faster transactions. Its distinguishing features are:

• masternodes
• the PrivateSend mixing mechanism to ensure coin fungibility
• all transactions are instant thanks to InstantSend without additional fees

In the DASH network, miners share the block reward with masternodes, which provide privacy and high transaction speed. Each group receives 45% of the reward.

To launch a masternode, a user must lock up 1,000 DASH. A masternode operator can withdraw or spend the collateral at any time, but the node will then lose masternode status and stop receiving rewards. The remaining 10% of the block reward goes to a special fund to finance the cryptocurrency’s development and improvement.

Decisions on what to fund are made by votes on the website dash.org.

• low fees ($0.005 — $0.01)
• privacy
• transaction speed

Critics include among DASH’s shortcomings the risk of network centralisation by establishing control over a majority of masternodes.

The coin, along with other privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, is also subject to delisting on exchanges as the latter seek to ensure legal compliance.

In December 2019, on the Evonet test network, developers plan to deploy Dash Evolution — a technology stack for building decentralised applications on top of DASH.

The incentive model for deterministic masternodes guarantees they will be paid more as the network develops and demand for ASIC devices used in mining DASH increases.

In 2020, the release of smartphones with a preinstalled DASH wallet will begin, and masternodes will migrate to individual chips, allowing them to scale to the size of data centres. Growing system requirements for masternodes will, in theory, promote the formation of a large, highly functional network.