It's been a long eight years. But things are finally starting to look better.
Dash, one of the oldest crypto projects in existence that's still kicking, has had one of the most brutal, harsh, soul-crushing experiences over the last several years. It went from a temporary 2017-era darling of the crypto markets to one of the most aggressive dives into oblivion that anyone had seen.
Some of it was being too early in rapidly-developing markets that would only appreciate its innovations years later. Some of it was concentrated campaigns by detractors to deliberately sabotage the project. And some of it was definitely a series of failures, which absolutely had to be owned up to in order to move on.
All in all, it was one of the worst combinations of tribulations we could imagine was possible to befall a crypto project.
Thankfully, we finally seem to be on the other side of it. Dash survived. Not without scars, but it's still here, ready to keep growing and innovating.
My involvement
I feel like now's the time to tell Dash's survivor story, and that I'm uniquely positioned to do so.
I started using crypto in 2013 and ditched my bank account in 2016 to live entirely fiat-free, but then Bitcoin failed me for these purposes. I found Dash, which was a perfect continuation of the peer-to-peer digital cash vision, and remained heavily involved in the community from 2017-2019. Now, starting at the beginning of 2024, that's what I do full-time.
Even though the crypto world largely moved on, I decided to jump headfirst into the abyss. I outlined some reasons for this in my announcement post at the beginning of the year, but it basically boils down to: what Dash was doing, digital cash for the masses, just wasn't being done right anywhere else, still, after all these years.... and I knew I could make a difference in saving it.
At time of writing, Evolution has been launched, the price is pumping a bit, we launched some cool partnerships, and lots of things are looking up. So now's a good time to look back on what we've overcome.
Let's go over some of the demons that Dash faced, survived, and eventually slayed.
"Neverlution"
Dash's biggest asset and hype point was Evolution, an upgrade which would add all the tools for modern finance to Dash at the blockchain level, including usernames, contact lists, interest-bearing accounts, invoices, and much more. This was really revolutionary stuff when envisioned in 2015, and hype around a supposed delivery of this sometime in 2018 was a big part of what propelled Dash to stratospheric heights.
Then it just.... never came.
Year after year, we heard there was a delay. Or that we were releasing this key necessary component first. Or that it launched on testnet, but by next year it was actually a devnet, and "real testnet" was still a year away.
After an initially-projected 2018 release, in 2022 we had nothing completed. Even though the Core (regular blockchain) part of Dash had continued to see improvements and innovations such as universal instant transactions, 51% attack defense, and many more, none of that mattered. Evo was promised, Evo wasn't delivered.
Building your entire brand around a massive, change-everything upgrade that never gets delivered is a surefire one-way ticket to the dustbin of history.
Slaying "Neverlution"
We finally delivered Evolution.
@dashpay/introducing-dash-evolution
Or, more accurately, Sam Westrich a.k.a. QuantumExplorer did. As one of Dash's developers, he saw the missteps being made in the development process, and built a key component of Evolution in secret on his own time, and presented it to the team. Not long after, leadership left, and Sam took over leadership of the Platform development team.
Much of it was just coded up by Sam himself, who pulled many 16-hour days over the next couple of years. But it got done. Evolution shipped, activated on mainnet in September of 2024, and is running smoothly. Now, we have a revolutionary decentralized data storage solution, a second blockchain, usernames, contact lists, and soon tokens and even smart contracts. Dash will very soon be a leading cryptocurrency project again, thanks to the delivery of Evolution and the ability to finally iterate on it with consistent releases.
If you had to pin Dash's survival on just one person, no question it would be Sam, by a mile.
"Unregistered Security"
The boogeyman of the US cryptocurrency scene has been the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC's high-profile lawsuits caused great damage to the crypto industry, and they were so egregious that they directly impacted electoral politics in the 2024 cycle.
Dash was affected when the SEC named it in several lawsuits as a coin sold as a security, but never directly alleged that it was one. Didn't matter. The FUD that Dash could not legally be sold the same as other cryptocurrencies, or that its developers would be targeted by the most powerful government in the world, took its toll on the price, blocked integrations, and more.
Slaying "Unregistered Security"
Dash simply waited this one out.
The SEC's behavior was so egregious, so toxic to the rest of the space, that it may have swayed an election. Now that regime change is coming to the US and SEC chair Gary Gensler resigned, coins like XRP (which was directly targeted in SEC lawsuits) have skyrocketed.
Dash's security FUD is over.
"Privacy Coin"
Dash's first-ever feature was a privacy feature, an integrated CoinJoin built into the protocol itself (unlike Bitcoin and its forks which had external services providing this). This feature has continually been improved and polished over the years, but was not a major focus since the project shifted to narrow in on user experience, speed, and mass adoption.
Regardless, Dash experienced the same issues as other similarly-branded "privacy coins." It was delisted from exchanges across Asia pretty universally, and then in several exchanges across Europe. Investors became timid, and this pretty universally affected this sector of the space.
Unlike its contemporaries, however, Dash's privacy feature left a completely transparent blockchain still. As a result, specific laws and regulations that affected other coins did not actually apply to Dash.
Just the word "privacy" or "PrivateSend" anywhere was enough to FUD the whole project as having the exact same attributes as its competitors to regulators and exchanges, letter of the law be damned.
Slaying "Privacy Coin"
Dash never managed to shake the false reputation of having the same tech as its contemporaries. But thankfully, laws, court cases, and general reputation around privacy improved. Regulations in Europe are clear around listing cryptocurrencies with privacy features, the Tornado Cash case yielded a positive result with OFAC's sanctions against the smart contract being deemed illegal, and more.
Most importantly, though, Dash got added to the @mayaprotocol, a cross-chain AMM DEX protocol, which has opened up dozens of new listings on exchange interfaces that use these decentralized rails. Zcash is also coming to Maya, and Monero is coming to Serai (another competitor), but Dash joined this world a full year before any other asset with explicit privacy features.
Privacy is a human right. We're going to make it.
"Not a Privacy Coin"
In a cruel twist of fate, Dash managed to get attacked from both sides of the privacy angle.
Much of this stemmed from an ill-fated attempt to explain the nuanced differences in order to receive better treatment.
Unfortunately, it turns out it wasn't a good idea to attempt to explain the nuance that, while Dash does have a privacy feature, it doesn't apply to standard definitions of the laws being applied to privacy protocols.
No regulators or exchanges that still exist were convinced by this argument, but our "friends" elsewhere in the cryptospace were more than happy to capitalize on this as a weakness to attack. The Monero community in particular jumped on this to say Dash isn't a privacy coin (a meaningless term at the end of the day, anyway) and imply that it did not have any advanced or explicit privacy features.
Not only that, but many prominent Monero voices claimed (or implied) that Dash had actually either removed its features to appease regulators, or had never had any to begin with, and that its leaders and community were lying all along.
Active misinformation campaigns by the Monero community aren't what they used to be anymore today, but this did have an effect, and damaged Dash's reputation.
Slaying "Not a Privacy Coin"
To a certain extent, being forgotten helps. But also, Dash implemented its privacy feature into all its wallets (desktop, mobile, Electrum), and with the launch of its username setup now has an advanced version of stealth addresses, also built into the wallets.
We can debate until we're blue in the face the merits of different privacy approaches, what does or doesn't constitute a "privacy coin", and more, but it's undeniable that Dash does at least care enough about privacy to have multiple explicit features for the protection of its users.
Also, I actively took initiative to work on a major privacy overhaul for Dash. More will come out on this soon, but suffice it to say that we're happily on the road to slaying this demon for good.
"Centralized Scamcoin"
Dash stands as the oldest DAO in existence right now that's fully-functioning and powering a major organization. It also pioneered the masternode (high-powered, incentivized node) concept. But either through misunderstanding of how a decentralized network can still come together as one, or through deliberate misinformation campaigns, a reputation of being some shady, centralized scam was spread.
A big part of this was, unsurprisingly, once more the Monero community.
It went far beyond that though, sadly. Many industry insiders, including Litecoin's well-connected founder, poisoned the well similarly.
I hesitated to mention Charlie Lee's unfortunate contributions to this because I've grown to respect both Litecoin and its community as a solid tool and movement focused on digital cash, and don't want to bring back up any bad feelings. But Charlie did what he did, and we need to acknowledge it before moving on.
Slaying "Centralized Scamcoin"
This, again, was something where time just had to tell.
Dash is still here, still doing important work, over ten years later. New users, companies, partnerships, etc. have no memory of the FUD of the past. A decade-long track record of consistently delivering quality, decentralized tools for financial sovereignty just had to do the talking, and establish its reputation beyond the FUD.
Sadly, a big part of it is that projects are openly centralized today. VC-funded projects with massive allocations to investors, a calcified foundation or founding company, and more are the norm today. Even if people believed Dash was centralized, it just doesn't matter in today's market (even though it very much does to freedom money).
Dash has no VC money, no foundation, no single group controlling everything, no external funding, and extremely transparent community governance. Its founder is long gone, his successor was removed by the community two years ago, and now there's no central figurehead at all anymore.
The Core team, which used to handle many things, now no longer does business development and marketing (I do), and handles a decreasingly significant portion of development. More on this next.
"Opaque Corporate Leadership"
After Dash's Founder Evan Duffield left around 2017, the Core team formalized into Dash Core Group, and largely led Dash until 2022. Its leadership was very corporate and formal, a big contrast from the crypto teams of the era, which were very clandestine, anon, and cypherpunk.
Some of this was a good idea: Dash was trying to grow up into something that regular people would use and trust. But, unfortunately, this came along with bureaucracy and opaqueness. The vibe became "just trust us" as regular communication with the community became more and more inconsistent.
Investors who had poured significant resources into Dash, and who had actual DAO votes to determine the outcome of the project, were "left on read" consistently as leadership gave the bare minimum information, going sometime weeks without communication in community channels. And yes, masternodes continued to vote in favor of the Core team year after year with poor results, but discontent was building nonetheless.
The boring, corporate approach to marketing and business partnerships also yielded poor results in an industry driven by memes, cypherpunk values, anti-authoritarianism, and an overall rebellious vibe.
Dash, one of the more revolutionary projects in terms of decentralization and radical financial sovereignty, nonetheless ended up consistently voting in a single entity to do most of development, partnerships, and marketing, and that entity consistently underperformed and under-communicated with its community.
Slaying "Opaque Corporate Leadership"
How did Dash move past its corporate opaqueness and underperformance problem? Well, here's some context:
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Basically, dissatisfaction reached a breaking point in 2022 and the DAO did what it was always supposed to do and simply forced out leadership through a vote. Quickly thereafter, problematic elements of the Core team exited, and the remaining members focused on protocol development.
Now Dash's development is spread across many different organizations and proposals, its business development and marketing is separated from development, and all key leaders (of which there are many) openly and directly collaborate, as well as communicate with the community directly. It's a night and day difference from two short years ago.
"Passive Community"
Finally, as a result of the previous demon, the Dash community remained very passive for years, waiting on the Core team or other one-off proposals to do everything. Much of this was due to one group doing most things for the network, and the community just got complacent.
There's also a certain element of many early Dash investors buying into this idea that they bought shares in this new global corporation, and that they didn't need to do anything other than sit back, attend board presentations, and collect profits. The previous corporate vibes of Dash Core Group didn't do much to dispel this myth.
Slaying "Passive Community"
Simply put, this is still a work in progress, but is actively improving. The workload and funding of the various tasks necessary to grow and maintain Dash is now split among many different entities, and some community members (shoutout to XKCD in particular) have stepped up to contribute critical tasks.
And, as I alluded to in the privacy part of this article, there's external, and externally-funded, development on this key element of Dash.
Looking Forward
When I decided about a year ago to go full-time into Dash, I knew it wasn't going to be a job, but a rescue mission. I knew I risked my professional reputation and career trying to fix something that most of the world had long written off. Today, it looks like we're pulling it off.
We delivered Evolution, are working on smart contracts for next year, privacy improvements, partnerships, hackathons, and onboarding tons of new users. So much work is left to do, but I think Dash is well on its way to more than just base survival, but to being one of the top decentralized cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects.
But we went through hell to get here.
By not dying, by keeping on going, and by resolving to do whatever it takes to deliver this critical mission of digital cash and decentralized data to the masses, we made it through the worst of it. Dash may be the most resilient project in the whole space, and it's only up from here.
What does not kill us makes us stronger.
Soon, some people are going to deeply regret trying so hard to kill us.