This Week In Dash: November 18th – November 23rd

This week has been another eventful week for Dash, despite lackluster price performance. Keep reading to get a summary of the week.

Dash Network News of the Week:

• Dash Wins Malta Blockchain Summit DAO Innovation Award: Dash NEXT has won the “DAO Building of the Year” award over Maker DAO and DAO Casino at the A.I. & Blockchain Summit in Malta for its innovations and ability to drive further cryptocurrency adoption. The award helps illustrate the success of the Dash DAO to select and fund organization that are able to promote and spread Dash awareness. After winning the award, multiple people approached the Dash Next team to discuss the possibility of integrating Dash.
• Dash’s Ryan Taylor Believes Instant Cryptocurrency Confirmations Can Solve Volatility: Taylor has said that he believes that instant cryptocurrency confirmations, such as those provided by Dash’s InstantSend and ChainLocks, can help solve the persistent issue of market volatility. Since Dash locks in two seconds, on average, it enables individuals to quickly enter and exit exchanges and provide any necessary liquidity. However, exchanges still need to need to recognize InstantSend and not require on-chain confirmations, but Dash has already been making progress with 20 exchanges currently supporting InstantSend.
• Dash Seasonality Data Shows Winter and Spring Among Best-Performing Seasons: New data from cryptocurrency asset manager and researcher Demelza Hays shows that Dash has clear market cycles in its trading patterns and price performance. Dash tends to perform the best in winter and spring months and worst in summer and falls months and more positively on weekends versus weekdays. Then the Dash volume spread throughout the months are also skewed towards winter and spring months versus the summer and fall, however, Dash tends to have a fairly even volume spread across days of the week.

Dash Integrations of the Week:

• BlackRock Joins Fidelity in Significantly Investing in Masternode Company Neptune Dash: The US-based global investment firm, reportedly owns over 11% of Dash masternode company Neptune Dash, bringing the total percentage of the company owned by major investment firms up past 21% when combined with the percentage owned by Fidelity. This also means that Neptune Dash comprises 0.63% of total assets owned by the Blackrock fund and 0.02% of total assets of by the Fidelity fund. The relatively major investment means a lot since Blackrock has been historically reserved about cryptocurrency investment while Fidelity has been fairly liberal with its cryptocurrency investments. Neptune Dash represents relatively stable returns with masternode payouts.
• Cryptobuyer Partners with Dash Text for SMS Cryptocurrency Purchases:  The popular Latin America-focused exchange and merchant point-of-sale system, has now partnered with Dash Text to bring simple SMS cryptocurrency exchanges to their merchant solutions in order to be accessible to the over 50% of individuals in various Latin American countries that only have a “dumb” phone. The move joins a growing list of cryptocurrency solutions that better help individuals send and receive remittances, including the recent addition of RemeZaZa from the Mexican exchange Cubobit.
• Floyx Cryptocurrency-Focused Social Media Network Adds Dash With 50% Discount: Floyx is a social media news network dedicated to cryptocurrency news, claims to function like Facebook and Twitter, and even has a function to allow companies to pay to promote their posts. Dash was integrated into the platform through the BuildWithDash program, a project funded by the Dash treasury to encourage startups and other organizations to either integrate or to build on top of Dash. The integration adds to other social media applications of cryptocurrency, including eToro recently introducing a portfolio based on Twitter sentiment with Dash comprising 47% at launch.
• VegaWallet Co-Founder – Dash Is Ideal Cryptocurrency for Payments: Jacob Ballou, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of cryptocurrency wallet and merchant solution VegaWallet that previously integrated Dash has said that Dash is the ideal cryptocurrency for payments due to its instant settlement capabilities from InstantSend and ChainLocks. He illustrated his beliefs by drawing a comparison to other various financial services including PayPal and bank wire transfers, many of which can take as little as three days and as many as several weeks to permanently settle whereas Dash only takes seconds.

Dash Core Group Project Updates of the Week:

Here’s an update from Liz Robuck, Chief Product Owner, of what’s going on at Dash Core Group this week.

• 🏄‍♂️ Preparing DashCore v0.14.0.4 for release with several improvements to InstantSend stability. This is a recommended upgrade for all nodes (both masternodes and regular nodes). A release announcement with additional details will follow
• 🖌 Applied CSS styling to the RPC console to improve the appearance of the UI
• 🎨 Made some small UI tweaks to DashQT, like removal of the border in pop up menus, unification in the look of various fields, fix for an issue with the “out of sync” label that caused spacing issues when it disappeared, fix for a warning label that caused spacing issues in certain languages, and removal of sub-tab for DIP3 masternodes (since they are the only type now)
• 🌘 Refactored some PoW (proof of work) functions including moving the special difficulty adjustment rule out of DGW (Dark Gravity Wave) as it does not have anything to do with the algorithm, and refactoring the GetNextWorkRequired function, which computes the new difficulty level. Refactoring only — should not impact behavior
• 👤 Researched the ability to rotate validator sets (e.g. a quorum of masternodes verifying platform blocks) using LLMQs in Dash Platform
• 📱 Completed work on several tasks related to the UI redesign on DashWallet Android, including menu screens, Change Pin screen, Currency Settings screen, Tools screen, and About screen
• 🇨🇳 Launched dash.org website in Traditional Chinese

General News of the Week:

• VeChain Founder Says 99% of Cryptocurrency Price Is Speculation: VeChain’s founder and CEO Sonny Lu said at the BlockShow Asia 2019 that most cryptocurrencies have little use outside of speculative trading, which causes most of the industry to focus on generating funding rather than on delivering viable products. He is not alone in his thoughts as others within and outside of the cryptocurrency industry have recognized this problem. Dash, however, has been focusing on delivering a usable currency for everyday life and so much so that it has actually seen its transaction counts increase despite falling exchange prices.
• Willy Woo: Most Cryptocurrencies Severely Lack Market Liquidity: Continuing the claim that most of cryptocurrency space is not actual usage, new data posted by cryptocurrency analyst Willy Woo on Twitter shows that most cryptocurrency projects severely lack market liquidity. This is a big problem for both investors and users since both would be unable to cash out of most cryptocurrencies and make them hesitant to adopt in the first place. Dash ranks among the top 15, partly due to a lot of Dash being locked up in masternodes, but there are hopes that as more exchanges recognize Dash Instantsend, Dash liquidity will increase as individuals can more easily move on and off exchanges to provide liquidity as needed.
• Roger Ver No Longer Believes Cryptocurrencies Should Be Private By Default: Early cryptocurrency adopter and Executive Chairman of Bitcoin.com has said that privacy in cryptocurrencies should not be enabled by default, such as with Monero because this causes complications for regulators and they will then default to just not allowing privacy coins. This can already be seen by exchanges delisting these privacy coins around the world. Dash is not private by default, but does offer PrivateSend as an option for users and has been trying to communicate to exchanges and regulators that PrivateSend is no different than sending Bitcoin through mixers and this effort has been able to reverse delistings in the UK and pause Dash delistings in South Korea.

Dash Media of the Week:

• Dash Podcast 131 Feat. Heidi Chakos aka Crypto Tips: This week, the guys welcome Heidi, who creates Dash News recap videos and other cryptocurrency news updates, to talk about her origin story, her opinion on maximalism and why there is a need to support cryptocurrency as a whole. They also chat about the best ways to get paid in cryptocurrency and how to live off of it by using various centralized and decentralized exchanges.

Dash continues to power ahead with plenty of network developments and news despite a falling exchange price as an example of its dedication to real world usability. Make sure to continue following Dash News to see all the updates that come in the future!