Dash

Dash (DASH) is a cryptocurrency developed for instantaneous and private transactions. It started out as the fork of the Litecoin protocol which the Dash developers saw as lacking in terms of transaction speed, privacy protection and governance handling. Evan Duffield, the creator of Dash, launched the platform in 2014. Back then, Dash was known as “Xcoin”, followed by being renamed to “Darkcoin”. In order to avoid associations with illegal transactions, it changed its name in 2015, with “DASH” standing for “digital cash”. This is hardly a coincidence, as Dash wants to become the platform of choice for fast digital payments. In order to make its coins usable for smaller transactions, such as those at grocery stores or gas stations, payment operations need to be both instantaneous and cheap, with an anonymity option as an added bonus. One of the main features of Dash is PrivateSend which protect the user’s financial privacy by obscuring the origins of funds. Another feature, InstantSend, should allow Dash to take on competitors in form of instantaneous transaction systems such as credit cards in the point-of-sale context. One of the examples for this is its implementation by the Church’s Chicken food chain in Venezuela.