I’m Andrew Playford coming to you from the bean in Chicago. In this video I’m going to talk about Dash Coin and what makes it a great project to keep an eye on.
Dash is a digital currency that was originally based off the Bitcoin software, but, it has two major improvements. Speed and Privacy.
Dash was released in January 2014 as XCoin. 10 days later it was re-named Darkcoin and a year later rebranded again to Dash, a portmanteau of “Digital Cash”. The project was founded by Evan Duffield but the team has since grown to over 30 core developers and numerous community volunteers.
Like Bitcoin, Dash uses a consensus mechanism of Proof of Work (PoW) where miners compete for block rewards. However, unlike Bitcoin, Dash has a two-tier network. This is Dash’s secret sauce. This second tier is powered by what they call master nodes and brings 3 important features:
Because this second tier is so important, masternodes are also rewarded when miners discover new blocks. The breakdown is 45% of the block reward goes to the miner, 45% is shared among the active masternodes, and 10% is reserved for the budgetary system every month.
The Dash coin supply is capped at 18.9M set to be reached in 2050. To date 7.8M coins are in circulation - around 40% of the max supply.
Now let’s talk about the budgetary system because it’s quite unique and it works really well.
Each month, 10% of the block rewards for the entire month are reserved for budget proposals. Masternode owners, vote on these proposals and the ones that are approved are paid directly by Dash’s blockchain. The money also pays for Dash’s development team, community projects, attendance at conferences, business integrations and so on. Every penny spent is fully transparent and in fact you can go check it out right now by visiting DashCentral.org.
At current prices the Dash project is seeing a potential monthly budget of around $5 million. I say potential because they don’t always use the full budget, but at these levels the project is easily sustainable for the long term.
In summary Dash is a good one to watch. Coin supply is sensible, its fast, its private and the developers are working on new masternode hardware they will make it massively scalable.
