This week has been another eventful week in the Dash community with new integrations and news. Continue reading to get a summary of the week

Dash Network Stats of the Week:

  • Ryan Taylor – Dash Usage Grows 178% Annually, Outpacing Competitors: The CEO of Dash Core explained in a twitter thread how Dash’s year-over-year median number of transactions grew by 178%, which nearly tripled from the third quarter of 2018. This also excluded coinbase and PrivateSend transactions which tend to only be intra-wallet and intra-personal transfers. Ryan also said that growth of other similar blockchain networks’ performance over the same time period was “not growing as consistently or dramatically” as Dash. Additionally, Taylor highlighted that the value and usage of various cryptocurrencies do not necessarily have to be reflected in their prices as the ecosystem is still growing.
  • Hashrate, Profitability for Bitcoin Cash, SV, and Litecoin Slip as Dash Holds Strong: Dash’s hashrate is up to around 3.93 petahashes, up from 2.14 petahashes one year ago and only down slightly from its all-time high of 4.42 petahashes earlier this month. This is compared to Litecoin being down significantly from its all-time high of 523.81 terahashes in July to 231.45 terahashes. Bitcoin Cash’s hashrate is currently at 2.41 exahashes, down significantly from 3.84 exahashes a year ago and last year’s high of 7.88 exahashes. Then Bitcoin SV is currently around 1.21 exahashes, down from roughly 1.44 exahashes after its split from BCH. From this, over the course of a day, total fees generated by the entire Litecoin network was only $453.77, Bitcoin Cash was $103.91 and Bitcoin SV was $79.94 compared to Bitcoin generating $132,790 over the same day. This shows that many of the secondary cryptocurrencies are struggling to generate enough fees outside of coin emissions to generate long-term sustainability. Dash, however, relies on a combination of coin emissions, miner rewards, masternode rewards, and treasury funds to fund the network. This combined with ChainLocks, Dash’s younger age, and longer emissions rate helps better prepare Dash for long-term sustainability.
  • Dash Core – Dash Fully Compliant With FATF Travel Rule, More Than Bitcoin: In a recent post, Dash Core Group Business Development Manager, Omar Hamwi, described how Dash is fully compliant with the new Financial Act Task Force (FATF) “travel rule” since Dash PrivateSend can only be enabled by the sender and thus do not pose a treat to exchanges since they can control outgoing withdrawals and there are ways for exchanges to comply with incoming transactions. This is actually more compliant than Bitcoin that shifts transactions off-chain, to the Lightning Network, and do not record transaction data on the immutable ledger.

Dash Integration of the Week:

  • IT Retailer MoreFrom Adds Dash Payments Through Utrust Partnership: Utrust, a merchant service provider for cryptocurrency that previously integrated Dash earlier this month, has now integrated UK based and multi-award-winning IT and office product independent retailer. The integrations follows other merchant solution providers like Salamantex, AnyPay, Cryptobuyer, and others that have enabled numerous other merchants to accept Dash. This solves direct adoption problems where the merchant wants more additional point-of-sales features than what a regular cryptocurrency wallet provides

Dash Core Group Project Update of the Week:

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

  • 🚅 Added support for another Continuous Integration system — Gitlab CI — to make sure Core development won’t be affected by potential Travis CI issues
  • 💻 Made some fixes to the desktop wallet to prevent some observed GUI freezes for larger wallets
  • ♺ Made a change to the Core wallet functionality so it will use UTXOs to calculate balances and select available coins instead of scanning through all transactions which should considerably lower the time spent on transaction creation
  • 🎡 Added some additional Bitcoin backports to keep our source code up to date with Bitcoin v0.16 and benefit from fixes and enhancements they have made
  • 🚣‍♂️ Made some optimizations in network code to reduce CPU usage on high load
  • 💫 Fixes in Core for coin selection when newly mined coins were not mixed once they matured
  • 🚨 Improved messaging in Core for when an invalid IP address is entered when a masternode operator is updating their information
  • 🗄 Finished Platform Machine integration, which validates state transitions (transactions that describe a change in the application’s state) in the Platform Chain and updates the state of data in Dash Platform
  • 🍝 Worked on the Dash Platform credit system (which will ensure the network is compensated for processing and storing application data)
  • 📱 Worked on Platform Light Client design. This allows light clients like mobile apps to verify data received from Dash Platform, similar to SPV for transaction verification
  • 📃 Added document and data contract state transitions types to Dash Platform Protocol, which will be used by Platform Machine to create and update data contracts and documents in Dash Platform
  • 🔐 Improved wallet recovery flow to make it easier to retrieve wallets on DashWallet iOS and implemented BLS Integrated Encryption Scheme to improve wallet security
  • 🚀 DashWallet Android v6.6.3 now fully available for all to download, with approximately 22K downloads so far
  • 🐛 Fixed a bug on DashWallet Android affecting transaction notifications while app is syncing and updated Firebase API to the latest libraries
  • Lastly, I wanted to call everyone’s attention to Ryan’s recent thread on Twitter regarding the consistent growth in usage of Dash over the past several quarters. The price may hurt right now, but these numbers are showing consistent, compounding growth in transactions over time. So hang in there folks — this is a marathon, and our mile times just keep getting faster. 💪

General News of the Week:

  • Lightning Network User Reportedly Loses 4 Bitcoin – What Happened: A Lightning Network user reportedly lost 4 Bitcoin recently and Darren Tapp explains why it shouldn’t come as a surprise since “[t]he Lightning Network replaces the elegant game theory that a Nakamoto Consensus affords with a revamping of the common prisoners dilemma”. Make sure to read the full article to get a more detailed description of the events.
  • China Eyeing Own Cryptocurrency to Maintain Financial Control: A New York times article recently discussed how Facebook’s announcement of the Libra had caused China to accelerate its efforts to create their own national digital currency. The article discusses how China views alternative currencies as a threat to its “monetary sovereignty” and interestingly wants to  practice “controllable anonymity” with a state sanctioned cryptocurrency that will give citizens some privacy, but only what the government deems acceptable privacy.
  • Fidelity Fully Rolls Out Cryptocurrency Custody Services: Fidelity, which was an early adopter of cryptocurrency, including a $200,000 mining rig in 2014 and investing in 10% of Neptune Dash, the publicly traded company that operates whole and shared Dash Masternodes. They are now fully rolling out a cryptocurrency custody service that illustrates the demand for cryptocurrency as a longer-term investment and the confidence behind the longevity of the technology.

Dash Media of the Week:

This week was a light week in Dash news and turbulent week in terms of price, but Dash continues to push ahead with integrations and developments for the long-term so make sure to tune in to catch all the future news.