To the surprise of many Dash keeps going up. Up to $559 from a lowly $10 at the beginning of the year, it’s the gift that keeps on giving, and keeps on displacing Litecoin, maybe for good this time. Plenty of crypto traders are puzzled, however: why? What happened that Dash is doing so well right now? In order to understand that, we’ll have to first look at why no one saw it coming.

The insular crypto world is loud with self-promotion

I would say that the cryptoverse doesn’t pay much attention to Dash, but in reality, it doesn’t pay much attention to anything. This is because, in such an emergent field, there are people coming up with new coins and projects every day, financially incentivized to have others buy into them. Everyone has the best project, everyone has the best privacy, every smart contract platform is going to revolutionize the way we do everything, etc. In order to not go insane, and not lose all your money, it’s imperative that you learn to tune most of this out. Therefore, it’s easy to see “just another alt” trying to distinguish itself from the pack of copycats, and give said coin the cold shoulder.

Dash suffered from “nothing really special” fallacy hype deficit

Compared to other coins, however, Dash has had difficulty generating “feature hype.” In the early days, when still called Darkcoin, Dash generated hype around its privacy features as the first major “anon coin.” Since then PrivateSend has been continually improved, made more efficient and airtight, and may soon be available on mobile devices, but remains the same basic tried and true functionality as before. While this speaks to the success of Dash’s features early on that they made something that worked the first time and never had to ditch it for something newer, it’s hard to generate publicity. The same goes for the rest of its features: the space’s best governance system got overshadowed by more hyped (and ultimately failed) projects like “The DAO,” and fast and cheap transactions were already kind of Litecoin’s thing, no matter how much better Dash may be able to do it. To the crypto world’s first glance, Dash looks like it still doesn’t do anything more than what Bitcoin did all those years ago except for a privacy solution some consider “retro.”

The outside world is completely ignorant about cryptocurrency

Even though it’s a quarter-trillion dollar industry by now and the average person has probably heard something about it, cryptocurrency is still a vast mystery to the global population. Your typical friend or relative knows about Bitcoin, may have heard about Ethereum, and probably talks about “blockchain changing everything” to impress even less educated friends. Anything else is a mystery. These kinds of people are precisely the type to want what Dash has to offer, yet they remain completely oblivious. They don’t really care about raspberry pis or immutability, and certainly care about $6 transaction fees, but have not even the faintest idea Bitcoin costs so much. Just as the crypto nerds ignored Dash because of too much information, the rest of the population did so because of too little.

Thorough investigation by serious investors caused Dash to fly

Now here’s where we get to the present beginnings of growth. A hardy band of Darkcoin diehards stuck to the project because their insider’s perspective showed what a gem they had discovered, while the occasional crypto curious traveler did a deep dive on various coins, eventually sticking with Dash after a thorough review of its fundamentals. Now, however, you’re starting to see more traditional investors get on board. These have the depth of research of a crypto aficionado, but attention to the kinds of factors that would cause a large company to succeed or fail. This group doesn’t care about the newest tech hype, as they’ve seen it all before and know that it’s ultimately worthless in the long run. This focus led them straight to Dash.

Now it’s inevitable. The astute are getting involved, and are being rewarded. This will get their friends and colleagues on board, and this will make the Dash fans in the cryptoverse happy, causing the rest of the field to take notice. Real success cuts through the hype, and those who previously ignored Dash will start to take notice and do the research they should have done to begin with. The snowball will keep rolling, and we’ll see an exciting 2018 and beyond.