Dash’s most recent expansion news in Latin America is Dash Colombia reaching 100 Dash accepting merchants and a Venezuelan ice cream shop accepting Dash.

Dash Colombia recently achieved the milestone of 100 Dash accepting merchants. The organization, which only recently received DAO funding has quickly been growing Dash adoption throughout the region. George Donnelly, Coordinator of Dash Colombia, previously told DFN how Colombia is experiencing some Dash adoption spillover from neighboring Venezuela, but a significant chunk of the adoption is due to a unique “street-level strategy”. They have found that a conference system would not currently work in Colombia since potential users and merchants are less likely to show up, so instead George and his team are taking Dash to users and merchants to show them how Dash can improve their lives and operations. George summarized to Dash Force News that they achieved adoption via hard work.

“Dash mass adoption is a question of hard work: knocking on doors, knowing your stuff, talking to people straight and offering real value, beyond what Dash itself offers.”

Neighboring Venezuela also continues to push ahead with significant Dash adoption.

https://twitter.com/StayDashy/status/1044713304889987075

Alejandro Echeverría, the co-founder of Dash Help, Dash Merchant – Venezuela, and Dash Text, filmed himself buying some ice cream from an efe merchant, the biggest ice cream company in Venezuela. As he walks in, he is immediately greeted by the ‘Dash – Accepted Here’ sticker on their window. Alejandro then gets to witness all the fantastic flavors he is able to purchase with Dash. He then demonstrated how quickly he was able to complete and confirm the transaction with Dash and get his delicious ice cream!

The video comes just a week after he made a similar video of him quickly buying pizzas from Papa John’s in Venezuela. Then the previous week he filmed two other videos of him purchasing cookies from Susy’s Cookies and a sandwich from Subway. Venezuela has seen rapid adoption of Dash due to their hyperinflationary fiat currency and the local Dash community developing the tools to make using Dash extremely easy and convenient.

Using cryptocurrency in everyday life

Cryptocurrency was created to be an digital, decentralized, secure, and peer-to-peer currency that was fast and cheap for everyday individuals to escape the undue influence of government fiat currency. Bitcoin was intended to be used for any type of purchases that consumers wanted to make, but when Bitcoin began to have scaling debates, the network became backlogged with transactions causing confirmation times and transaction fees to skyrocket, which made it no longer completely reliable for cheap and fast transactions at a moments notice.

Dash has been able to achieve this goal of fast, cheap, and secure transactions and has made it available for physical-world purchases. The advances mentioned above demonstrate the ability of Dash to be used in everyday life for ordinary transactions. Dash is accepted at over 1,500 merchants in Venezuela, now 100 merchants in Colombia, and over 3,000 merchants around the world. When making a Dash transaction, consumers just have to spend around $0.0005 USD for a normal confirmation with block times around 2.5 minutes or spend around $0.01-$0.02 USD for an InstantSend confirmation in 1-2 seconds. This has been integral for brick-and-mortar merchants since consumers still want to make their transactions quickly and cheaply, but merchants do not want to subsidize expensive transaction fees, make consumers wait for confirmations, nor risk double-spend fraud. Dash has been able to achieve this growth due to its unique structure that has enabled productive development and community outreach.

Dash’s structure enables its growth

Dash has a unique structure of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that is comprised of miners (gets 45% of block rewards), Masternodes (gets 45% of block rewards), and the Treasury (gets 10% of block rewards). The Treasury allocates its funds based on voting by the Masternodes, whom must stake 1,000 Dash. This helps further secure the network, as well as incentivizes Masternodes to act in the best interests of the network due to their vested financial interests. This has allowed the Dash network to fund its own development and various projects that work to increase Dash users and adoption by educating consumers and merchants about the advantages of using Dash.

Dash Venezuela, Dash Colombia, Dash Brazil, Dash Help, and Dash Text are just some of the groups funded by the Dash DAO Treasury. However, the Treasury has come under fiat exchange price pressure, but the Dash community was able to innovate solutions. DashBoost, DashDonates, Dash Ventures, and Mega Dash Raffle all began to emerge from the innovative community as potential supplements to enable Dash to continuously fund projects that are advancing the interests of the Dash network. Dash has shown that its unique structure creates a collaborative, productive, innovative, and consensus-reaching community that allows Dash to rapidly grow.