Dash transactions and active addresses have surpassed those of Litecoin, as well as across other key indicators.
This month, Dash has passed competitor Litecoin in several key performance indicators correlated with wider adoption. According to data pulled from BitInfoCharts, in terms of daily transactions, Dash has surpassed Litecoin, counting 30,189 transactions over the past 24 hours at time or writing, compared with 26,830. This counts as the third day in a row with a similar disparity, part of a gradual trend over the last three months. This trend is more apparent over the year-long comparison, with Litecoin daily transactions remaining in the mid-20,000 range consistently, while Dash has grown from typically under 10,000 daily transactions, with the notable exception of several large spikes due to network stress tests used to show that the network can scale significantly past current industry leaders and be adopted as a widely used payment system.
In terms of fees, Dash currently has a median transaction fee of well below one cent, while Litecoin’s median of 2.1 cents is over 30 times higher. During times of high congestion this fee has gone higher than $1.40, while even during peak activity processing millions of transactions Dash’s median fee has remained low.
In terms of active addresses, Dash has also pulled ahead recently, counting 107,318 active addresses in the last 24 hours at time of writing, contrasting with 66,007 for Litecoin. Similar to transaction counts, this change has been a recent and gradual trend, however Dash has surpassed Litecoin several times over the past several months. Long-term, Litecoin has maintained consistently higher active address numbers, however over the course of this year the top tanking has been much more closely contested, with the two networks frequently trading places for this metric.
Dash’s security and decentralization have pulled ahead as well, particularly post-ChainLocks
The Dash network has grown consistently in usage and viability over the past several years, making gains against Litecoin in several important metrics. While mining hashrates are not directly comparable due to very different algorithms, Dash has experienced more relative growth in its network hashrate, growing from 1.621 petahashes to 3.8554 petahashes most recently, representing a 137.84% growth over the last year. Litecoin, meanwhile, grew from 259.15 terahashes to 455.08 terahashes over the past year, representing a 75.6% growth.
Additionally, the recent activation of ChainLocks, Dash now has anti-51% attack protection, requiring a compromise of the masternode network as a prerequisite to a 51% mining attack. This significantly increases the number of independent parties required to attack Dash vs. a competitor such as Litecoin or even Bitcoin, increasing network decentralization and security dramatically.
Finally, in terms of decentralization, Dash has a significantly more decentralized coin supply than Litecoin. According to data from CryptoID, the top 10 Dash addresses control 6% of the coin supply vs. 10% for Litecoin, while the top 100 addresses contain 15.6% of the supply vs. 45.9% of Litecoins, nearly half the entire supply for the network. This disparity becomes even more dramatic with the top 1,000 addresses, of which for Dash they contain 29% of the supply, compared to 64.1% for Litecoin.
Dash’s continual growth and active development stands in contrast with other old competitors
The Dash network continues to grow and develop, making gains against longtime competitors over several areas. Dash has a significantly-developed network, with more nodes than top competitors combined, with incentivized robust masternode counts over half of Bitcoin’s non-incentivized nodes. Additionally, Litecoin and Dogecoin have shown nearly dead development, while Dash has released two major network overhauls this year alone.
