Dash (DASH) is the coin for the real world – increases its penetration into Venezuela and Africa markets
DASH didn’t have a very dashing month behind it. Starting the July with the monthly high of 332.97 USD/0.04324310 BTC, the token slowly petered off into the red in the following 30 days. The coin reached its monthly lows of 216.85 USD/0.02806170 BTC on the 31st and continued the downwards pattern into the month of August.
Right now, after a strong drop-off caused by BTC weakness, one DASH token is worth $150.92 USD (a rise of 8.25% in the last 24 hours)/0.02362401 BTC (3.70% rise in the last 24 hours.) The token has a very high daily trade volume of 20,863 BTC, most of which is traded on ZB.COM (40%) and Coinsuper (17.60%). With a market cap of 1,240,196,202 USD, DASH is currently the 13th most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.
While some traders noticed a downward wedge on the graph from which they predict the coin testing the resistance levels at 0.047 BTC, others are “feeling” a short on the DASH’s short term future:
“As expected the 165.3263 Low broke and the 1W Falling Wedge ( RSI = 34.709, MACD = -86.950, Highs/Lows = -75.6494, B/BP = -164.8717) is now looking for the Lower Low extension. Our TP remains more moderate = 100.21 and with 1D on a 27.783 RSI and oversold on 5 indicators, it is a probability for next week,” said InvestingScope from TradingView.
The token has been quite active as of late. Just a couple of days ago, the members of the Dash Core Group Inc. held a quarterly community presentation on Youtube during which they presented the progress they’ve made on the Dash project during Q2 of 2018 and answered several community questions.
The presentation included a release of the revised project roadmap.
Get Ready For Take Off! ??? The @Dashpay roadmap is here! The #Dash Core team is pushing hard to deliver these awesome new additions! 2019 is going to be the year of $DASH. ??? True financial freedom!#Cryptocurrency #FinTech #Blockchain #Technology pic.twitter.com/aVtijJpC8o
— Mark Mason (@StayDashy) August 13, 2018
The roadmap showed that the team plans to release 12.4, “Pre-Evolution” version software upgrade by the end of Q3 of the year, that will be followed up with a 13.0 “Evolution” upgrade. Dash Evolution, the fully operational Dash payment protocol, was supposed to come out back in June 2018. Obviously this deadline has been missed and the team reassured the community that this won’t happen again.
?Read our comparison of Dash vs bitcoin
Mentioned presentation/conference call brought much more to the community. They addressed their request for a no-action letter from the SEC that should put investors, consumers, and exchanges at ease that Dash is in fact not a security. Concerns about treasury funding came up as well, as DCG promised to set up self-limits and clear guidances for future spending. Potential scaling improvements were discussed as well. You can check out the entire, 2-and-a-half hour long presentation here.
In other news, Dash confirmed that Masternode and Merchant adoption reached all-time highs, as there are currently over 4800 Dash Masternodes and over 2000 merchants accepting DASH all over the world. TravelbyBit played a significant role in this, as they’ve recently introduced DASH to its network of over 200 merchants. Dash themselves made a heavy push for Venezuela and Africa, looking to help the “unbanked” more. As a result, DiscoverDash.com lists over 1000 Venezuelan merchants on their page. The team also completed payment partnerships with Fanduel, 34 Bytes and Bitrefill which should create new adoption avenues for the currency.
?Read here a comparison of the best privacy coins.
Dash has obviously grown as a project in the last couple of months, perhaps as a result of the increased adversity ruling the crypto markets. Directly as a result of the market the currency itself is underperforming, as transaction levels on the platform are dropping off significantly. Some are also blaming Dash’s leadership for this, claiming that their investments into African/Venezuelan payment infrastructure clearly failed and weren’t good ideas in the first place. Dash CEO and former Wall Street executive Ryan Taylor remained true to their model, implying in a recent interview that regulatory uncertainty is slowing them down in achieving wider adoption:
“Right now, regulatory uncertainty is preventing a lot of businesses from jumping in to provide services or become comfortable accepting payments in digital currencies. Regulators will eventually catch up and provide businesses with the guidance they need to gain comfort with it.”
Still, Dash remains a relatively popular currency to invest in, with the Chinese mining giant Bitmain recently confirming that they hold over 312 thousand DASH tokens.
The project definitely has a lot of work ahead of them, with focus currently sitting on the release of 13.0 version of Dash Evolution. Once this platform is officially released, we will know more about what exactly this currency has to offer.
