Dash’s price shot up past $500, likely on the recommendation of the Palm Beach Research Group’s investor report.

The financial publication released a report on Dash on Monday, titled We’ve Found the “PayPal” of the Pot Industry, promising readers a method to “Make Five Times Your Money in 24 Months.” The report outlines cryptocurrency’s lack of a clearly defined use case (“Cryptocurrency is a solution searching for a problem”), and mentions the overhead costs incurred by the legal marijuana industry in the US, which at present lacks adequate banking services due to its legal grey area at the federal level, and must operate as cash-only businesses. Due to its usefulness as a payment system, and a strategic partnership with payment processor Alt Thirty Six, which aims to target cannabis businesses first, Dash is recommended as a top investment pick:

“The cryptocurrency that we believe the marijuana industry will turn to is known as a “commerce” coin. This means the coin is designed for everyday transactions. That’s very different from bitcoin, which was designed as a store of value like gold. The name of this coin is Dash (DASH).”

Recommended buy-in up to $600, a sharp price increase

At the conclusion of the report, a set of recommendations are given, in summary: buy Dash up to the $600 price point from recommended exchanges Bittrex and Binance.

Action to Take: Buy Dash (DASH)
Buy-up-to Price: $600
Stop Loss: None
Buy It On: Bittrex, Binance
Store It On: Jaxx, Ledger Wallet

Likely as a result of this recommendation, the price of Dash experienced a very sharp increase. Late Monday, the price shot up from about $447 to $514 over the course of about 30 minutes. At time of writing it remains close to this high on a 24-hour trading volume of over $240 million, over three times the $70 million level before the surge. The suggested exchanges, Bittrex and Binance, account for over $53 million of volume.

Recognition of Dash’s focused long-term industry plan

Explaining their recommendation, the Palm Beach Research Group’s report describes the path PayPal took to dominance in the online payments industry, through finding a sector that desperately needed fast and easy online payments: online auctions. Through perfecting this use case, PayPal leveraged eBay’s success to build its own payments empire, based first and foremost on solving a critical problem. Dash is similarly seen as becoming the “killer app” to solve a serious void in the marijuana industry:

There were three keys to PayPal’s success:
It was the first company to send and receive money instantly online.
It was the first payment provider on eBay.
It was the easiest payment service to use on eBay.
Dash is following PayPal’s playbook to a “T.””

In particular, the report singles out InstantSend as a feature that few competing cryptocurrency projects have seen the need (or had the ability) to replicate:

“One common complaint against cryptocurrencies is how long it takes to confirm payments. On an especially busy day, it can take hours to confirm a payment on the bitcoin network.

Dash solves this problem with a feature called “instant send.”

The “instant send” feature can provide six blockchain confirmations in less than one second. This allows a merchant to process Dash payments immediately.

At this time, no other major cryptocurrency can do this. This is the same “edge” PayPal enjoyed when it launched its instant payment over email.”

As knowledge and research continues to spread about Dash, more investors may begin to take notice of its unique value proposition.