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In this article, we take an in-depth look at crypto DASH, a cryptocurrency that was born in 2014 from a hard fork of the Bitcoin protocol and became very popular in the following years, before falling into decline from 2018 onwards.
Like bitcoin, the Dash project is not governed by a central body, but by the entire community, which democratically decides on future developments and policies through an autonomous structure (DAO).
Furthermore, like the king of the crypto market, the currency in question will be mined through mining practices and will be subject to an annual progressive decrease in reward for each block added to the network.
See all the details below.
The birth of crypto Dash and the history of the Bitcoin fork
The crypto DASH was born on 18 January 2014 from an invention by US software developer Evan Duffield.
The coin was initially released under the name Xcoin, only to be renamed Darkcoin shortly afterwards due to the success of cryptocurrencies on the darknet markets.
Shortly afterwards, the project’s creator realised that such a name could hinder the technological progress of his own protocol and decided to permanently change the coin’s name to DASH, an abbreviation of the term “digital cash”.
By 2016, crypto was no longer in continuous use in the various dark markets of the time. The coin was created with the initial intention of replacing Bitcoin and improving some of its technical limitations, which are still criticised by supporters of so-called altcoins.
The DASH crypto is indeed more efficient in some aspects, such as the number of transactions that can be executed per second (TP/s) and the fees required.
It also differs from the first crypto on the market in that it has 4 times less block time and a slightly lower block reward tendency (7.14% per year), which occurs every 210240 blocks (approximately every year).
In reality, however, Evan Duffield’s project has many similarities with Bitcoin, as it was born with a hard fork of the protocol created by Satoshi Nakamoto, which required all clients interested in participating in the new protocol to install a new version of the software.
In simple terms, this means that Dash’s backbone comes from the original Bitcoin backbone, to which modifications were then made.
In principle, both cryptographic networks achieve distributed consensus among the nodes of the network through the proof-of-work mechanism, and the corresponding coins are mined through mining practices that incentivise the proper functioning of the network.
However, bitcoin is much more famous than dash and has managed to maintain its hegemony in the crypto market over the years, enjoying greater glory as it was born before all other cryptocurrencies.
Dash, on the other hand, has lost much of the fame it enjoyed between 2014 and 2017 and has been in decline since 2018, drowned out by the strong development the blockchain sector has experienced in recent years and the emergence of much more competitive projects.
The DASH crypto community
Although the name of the project’s creator is publicly known, the DASH crypto is not governed by a central authority, but rather by a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).
This means that the entire community can contribute by voting on proposals for updates that they deem appropriate, which are implemented (if a quorum is reached) by volunteer developers who care about the future of the protocol.
The use of DAOs in the crypto sector has become increasingly popular since 2018, as a method of decentralising its structure and giving its users democratic voting power over the course of a particular project.
For Dash, the first major developers and founder Evan Duffield opted for this type of organisation in August 2015, and to this day the protocol is coordinated in a decentralised manner.
The DAO in question is able to finance its activities through a “governance fund”, which in turn is subsidised by fees generated within the cryptographic network.
Specifically, the fees paid by users to use the Dash chain are broken down as follows: 45% to the miners, 45% to the master nodes, 10% to the governance fund.
Master nodes and mining
Within the Dash community, there is a category of individuals who have a well-defined role and contribute to the maintenance of the network and its sustenance.
These are masternodes, individuals who autonomously decide to install complete nodes on the Dash network that hold a complete copy of all transactions made on the blockchain.
They also provide advanced services that facilitate operations such as InstantSend, CoinJoin and usernames on the protocol.
To become a master node, one must own at least 1,000 Dash in a crypto wallet and meet certain technical requirements, including CPU type, RAM, disk space and available network bandwidth.
In return for their valuable work, these individuals are rewarded with a portion of the fees generated by users using the Dash infrastructure.
Importantly, master nodes are also those who participate in the governance of the project by voting on community proposals. Each of these individuals has voting power equivalent to 10% of the block’s premium to fund community projects that support the Dash ecosystem.
Another very important figure in the Dash ecosystem are the miners, who do not hold an entire copy of the blockchain, but use hardware such as GPUs or ASICs to validate the network’s transactions, similar to what happens with bitcoin.
The network uses an X11 hashing algorithm (unlike bitcoin, which uses SHA-256), named after the eleven scientific hashing algorithms it relies on to complete its proof of work.
This algorithm allows for maximum security by using a reduced number of nodes and with a blockchain that is small compared to the size of bitcoin. Each block is mined approximately every 2.6 minutes and contains approximately 2MB of data, which means it can handle approximately 56 transactions per second.
The block reward per validated block is 2.312214 DASH and is subject to a progressive decrease of 7.14% per year.