Dash Venezuela recently hosted their 11th Dash Conference, 9th Dash City, and 8th Journalist Workshop in the Centro Cultural Chacao in Caracas, Venezuela.
The first day of the conference started with a workshop for 12 local journalists. The Dash Venezuela communication team started the workshop by discussing “the topics and participants to the activity, the founder of Dash Caracas, Eugenia Alcalá, the sponsors of the 11th conference, Kripto Mobile, and two case of success of entrepreneurs.” Both entrepreneurs talked with journalists about their experience using Dash as apart of their business and how they are rapidly expanding and integrating Dash into their operations; one even pays their tomato supplier in Dash.
The next day was the actual conference, titled “Marketing of basic products and services in cryptocurrencies: New business models”, which covered entrepreneurship and integrating Dash and cryptocurrencies into businesses. The conference was a host to 132 people in total and revealed the first look at the KRIP phone, which is the first phone with a Dash Wallet preinstalled. Uphold, the cryptocurrency exchange and also one of the event sponsors in addition to Kripto Mobile, talked about their involvement in Venezuela and inclusion on the KRIP phone. After the conference, Dash City was opened where attendees could buy goods and services from local entrepreneurs with their own Dash or the 0.0166 of Dash given away to individuals in attendance. Photos from the event depict the sheer amount of fun had during the conference.
Dash grows through community outreach
Dash Venezuela exemplifies how to grow Dash via community outreach and involvement by educating individuals about Dash and how Dash can benefit their lives. This most recent conference iteration showcases their outreach strategy with the journalist workshop to teach journalists more about Dash and how it benefits entrepreneurs and individuals so they can better represent and discuss Dash in their future coverage. The conference was also able to educate consumers and entrepreneurs about Dash and how it is impacting the lives of everyday Venezuelans, such a the new KRIP phone that will allow Venezuelans to begin using Dash even more easily. Eugenia Alcalá, Dash Venezuela and Dash Caracas founder, then gave a talk to highlight what they “want to achieve is that each Venezuelan knows what blockchain technology is, what Dash is and how to use it in their daily life”. The event also heard from José Manuel Da Silva, co-founder of Dash Maracay and President of the Chamber of Industry of the State of Aragua who discussed the growth they are seeing in his region.
“2% of our customers use Dash as a form of payment, we hope to take it to more than 50%”
The conference then had a question and answer session with the speakers to help further clarify any remaining questions attendees had about Dash. Finally, Dash City wrapped up the event with 26 merchants that only accepted Dash for selling “food, beverages, clothes, accessories, art, technical support, tourism, non profit organizations, and more”. In total, there were 132 people who attended the conference and made 938 transactions at the Dash City during the event.
Dash is booming in Venezuela because of real world solutions
Dash has seen record adoption in Venezuela with over 1000 Dash accepting merchants, many of whom were recently added in the past few months. A lot of the adoption can be attributed to Dash’s real world usability since its record low transaction fees and fast transaction times enable use by consumers and merchants in everyday transactions. Merchants do not want to pay extra fees for transactions and neither do consumers, nor do they want to wait ten minutes for block confirmations to avoid double-spend risks. Dash allows transactions for less than pennies (USD) and has a block confirmation time that averages around 2.5 minutes. Plus, for a little over a penny (USD), consumers and merchants can get instant confirmations with InstantSend. These services are all vastly superior and provide a real life alternative to the hyper-inflationary Bolivar that plagues the country with its unpredictability and unreliability.
Of course, as good as Dash’s offerings are, it still has to attribute a lot of its adoption to the hard work of Dash Venezuela, its affiliates, and all of their team members for educating locals about Dash and how it can benefit their lives. Many within Venezuela are working too hard to take time out of their busy lives to discover Dash and learn how it can benefit them, but the Dash Venezuela community has lowered this barrier to entry. These community outreach groups, in addition to groups like Dash Merchant, Dash Help, Dash Colombia, and more have been enabled by the Dash DAO Treasury and the generous Dash community. The whole Dash adoption process within Venezuela exemplifies how Dash is able to apply its technological advances and innovative and persistent community to help individuals in need around the world.
