Dash (DASH)

Dash (DASH) is a cryptocurrency designed for everyday payments, launched in January 2014 and known for near-instant confirmations and an optional mixing feature that makes transactions harder to trace. Its name is short for "digital cash". DASH is mined, spent, held as an investment and locked up as collateral to run the special servers, called masternodes, that give the network its extra features.

Dash began life as a fork of the code behind Litecoin (LTC) and is often grouped with privacy coins, although its privacy is optional and weaker than that of Monero. It is governed on-chain: masternode owners vote on how a share of every block reward is spent, and the Dash Core Group, funded from that budget, maintains the main software.

Think of Dash as a shared cash register run by two kinds of staff. The first group, the miners, compete to add each new page of sales to the ledger, just as on Bitcoin. The second group, the masternode operators, have each put down a large deposit to prove they will behave. Because they have so much to lose, the network trusts them to approve a payment within a couple of seconds, long before the miners finish the next page.

Those same operators can also shuffle coins between willing users, so that an outside observer has trouble telling whose money went where. Shuffling is optional, and many payments skip it. In return for their deposit and work, masternode owners receive a large share of the new coins the network creates, and they also get a vote on how a common budget is spent.

Evan Duffield launched the coin as XCoin on 18 January 2014, renamed it Darkcoin in February 2014 and rebranded it as Dash in March 2015 to move away from associations with dark markets. Its launch was controversial: a bug in the difficulty calculation produced close to two million coins in roughly the first day and a half, a large share of the eventual supply, which critics have called an "instamine". The project's response was to keep the chain rather than restart it. A self-funding treasury and masternode voting followed in 2015, ChainLocks (protection against chain reorganisations) arrived in 2019, and in July 2024 Dash launched Evolution, or Dash Platform, a second layer that adds usernames and data storage run by higher-collateral masternodes known as evonodes.

Dash uses proof of work with the X11 hashing algorithm and produces a block about every 2.5 minutes. Since a Dash Core upgrade in late 2023, each block reward is split 60 percent to masternodes, 20 percent to miners and 20 percent to the governance budget, which funds development and marketing through proposals that masternodes approve. A masternode requires 1,000 DASH as collateral and an evonode 4,000 DASH. Groups of masternodes, called long-living masternode quorums, sign transactions for InstantSend, which locks a payment within seconds, and sign blocks for ChainLocks, which makes a 51% attack much harder. The optional privacy feature, CoinJoin (formerly called PrivateSend), applies the CoinJoin technique by mixing coins of equal denominations from several users in rounds coordinated by masternodes.

Dash has a maximum supply of about 18.9 million coins. Instead of halving like Bitcoin, the block reward falls by one fourteenth, about 7.14 percent, every 210,240 blocks, which is roughly once every 383 days:

• $R_{n}$ is the block reward after $n$ reduction periods.
• $R_{0}$ is the block reward at the start of the count.
• $n$ is the number of 210,240-block periods that have passed.

If a block reward stood at 2.0 DASH, then after five more periods it would be $2.0 \times \left(\frac{13}{14}\right)^{5} \approx 1.38$ DASH, a fall of about 31 percent. Because the cut is gradual, new issuance tapers smoothly rather than in sudden steps, and the last coins will not be mined until the next century.

• Payments. Dash has been accepted by merchants and payment apps in parts of Latin America, notably Venezuela during its hyperinflation, where fast settlement and low fees mattered.
• Masternode income. Holders with 1,000 DASH or more can run a masternode, or join a shared service that runs one, to earn part of the block reward.
• Governance. Masternode votes decide which projects receive money from the monthly budget, an early example of on-chain governance.
• Trading. DASH trades on many cryptocurrency exchanges, though fewer than at its peak.

Because of its mixing feature, Dash has been treated as a privacy coin by some exchanges and regulators. Several exchanges, including Japanese platforms in 2018, delisted it alongside Monero and Zcash to meet anti-money laundering expectations, and the European Union's anti-money laundering rules due to apply from 2027 bar regulated providers from handling anonymity-enhancing coins. Supporters reply that CoinJoin is optional and that most transactions are fully visible, which blockchain analytics firms can trace. Critics also point to the instamine, to the concentration of masternode rewards among large holders, and to long delays in delivering Evolution. Dash's share of crypto payments has fallen as stablecoins took over much of the role it once aimed to fill.

• Dash
• Dash documentation