*obligatory not financial advice*
What is DASH?
Dash is a rather old cryptocurrency and unlike most cryptos these days it is actually a cryptocurrency. The utility of Dash is to be used for fast and cheap global payments and its end goal is to become the most user-friendly digital cash.
Dash originated as a fork of Litecoin in 2014 and it tried to improve it further by adding optional instant and private transactions to it. To archive this it uses a unique 2 layer consensus mechanism. There are normal miners that use proof of work to process regular transactions and there are master nodes that have to stake at least 1000 Dash to handle special transactions.
InstaSend
Regular payments with Dash are already pretty fast, but they could still take a few minutes to be completely confirmed. If you want your transaction to be completed within a few seconds you can pay a higher network fee and have a master node process your InstaSend transaction.
This feature makes it possible to use Dash for payments in real life. With Bitcoin it would be practically impossible to buy something at the drug store because nobody would want to wait 10 minutes for the BTC to arrive in the stores wallet and another 40 minutes to make sure the block with the transaction is confirmed.
PrivateSend
Most blockchains are public and all their transactions can be traced. Bitcoin and regular transactions with Dash do offer some level of anonymity but if your friends know your address they could probably find out that you are so desperate for female attention that you are sending OF models money. Dash solves this issue with its PrivateSend feature that is also handled by the master nodes in exchange for a fee.
The fact that this privacy is only optional makes Dash especially attractive because regulators that are fighting privacy coins are more likely going after coins with privacy by default like Monero. However, there have been a few exchanges in the past that had to remove Dash from their list because of its PrivateSend.
The DASH coin
DASH has a max supply of 18.921.005 coins. About 60% of all coins are already minted. The number of newly mined coins is lowered every year by roughly 7%. DASH is supported by pretty much every big exchange but the exchange with the highest trading volume is of course Binance, which also lets its users stake their DASH for and APY of up to 10%.
The main utility of the coin is only to send and receive value, but it is also used for staking to run a master node and for governance over the network. There is a treasury that receives 10% of the newly mined coins and it is governed by master nodes and DASH holders. This funds are used to push Dash and its adoption forward. This has led to the creation of several organisations that are providing further development and marketing for the blockchain.
Dash has many great features that a digital cash crypto really needs like optional privacy and instant payments. But pure payment coins simply don't have as much potential as smart contracts. There is also a strong competition, the Lightning Network makes using Bitcoin much cheaper and Flexa makes it very convenient for stores to accept payments with various cryptocurrencies.
DASH will likely never meet its all-time high from 2018 again, but it does have a strong community, solid marketing and probably most importantly it has survived multiple bear markets already. So just maybe DASH will have a comeback, but coins like ETH, ALGO, SCRT and many more have more potential.
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