Open Source
Dash is an open-source cryptocurrency and decentralized autonomous organization. The project began as a Litecoin fork, aiming to overcome Bitcoin’s shortfalls in governance, consensus, and speed.
P2P
Dash advocates itself as peer-to-peer decentralized electronic cash. It intends to be as liquid as real cash and eventually a replacement for it.
The current system is growing its presence in Latin America, hoping to improve the digital payment infrastructure within that region. The project focuses on privacy, global merchants, ease of use, speed, and low fees.
Has yet to reach wide adoption and everyday purchases like a cup of coffee are not yet available in many major cities. However, the system is fast, economical, easy to use, and the team provides plenty of resources and help for new merchants.
By utilizing the Masternode network, users can send and receive instant irreversible transactions. The network sets a transaction lock, which enforces the inputs of the transactions to be spendable only in those specific transactions.
It takes around four seconds for the quorum to form and to set the transaction lock. InstantSend opens up the door for vendors to use mobile devices instead of traditional POS systems for the web.
PrivateSend is the name of Dash’s privacy mechanism. The Dash team aims to have a standard trust-less implementation for improving the privacy of its users, along with a high degree of privacy in their clients.
PrivateSend itself is based on the CoinJoin mechanism, with significant improvements and extensions. CoinJoin is just merging transactions to obfuscate the original transactions. The vulnerability of CoinJoin is that the original transactions can be traced back simply by various backtracking methods.
Aside from CoinJoin, Dash implements a series of improvements such as decentralization, strong anonymity by using a chaining approach, denominations, and passive ahead-of-time mixing.
PrivateSend takes several inputs and merges them such that they cannot be uncoupled after that. The merging requires at least three participants. It is important to note that PrivateSend only works with denominations of either 0.1DASH, 1DASH, 10DASH, or 100DASH.
Nodes on the network perform sensitive tasks in a trustless manner, thus providing a quicker infrastructure.
In order for a regular node to become a Masternode, 1,000 DASH must be stored and locked for a certain duration, with Masternodes getting approximately 45% of the total block reward. (with an allocation of 45% of the rewards to the miners, 45% to the Masternodes, and 10% to the self-governing communities). However, there are limits to this system.
There is a hard and a soft limit of the active number of nodes on the network. The hard limit is the total number of DASH in circulation divided by 1000DASH — there can ever be so much DASH. The soft limit, on the other hand, is imposed by the price it costs to acquire a node and the limited liquidity on exchanges.
The nodes in the network must ping the rest of the network to ensure they are active. The network pseudo-randomly selects two nodes per block to ensure that they are active. Approximately 1% of the network is checked in each block, and the entire network is checked about six times per day.
Dash’s network functions both similarly and differently to the native Bitcoin or Litecoin networks. The main difference between the two is that DASH employs the use of the so-called Masternodes.
In their very core, Masternodes are full nodes but can provide any number of extra services to the network and have a bond of collateral (1,000DASH) to participate.
The Masternodes network keeps the security safe and allows the participants to earn interest and also reduce the volatility of the currency. This greatly reduces the number of nodes needed to process network transactions and also offers a source of passing income for Masternode holders.
As far as hardware wallets go, there are two obvious choices- Trezor and Nano Ledger S, which both support DASH.
Hardware wallets are also called "cold storage", they are dedicated wallet devices, often in the form of a USB stick. Just plug it in to an internet-enabled device to transfer assets. Even though transactions are made online, the keys are stored offline. Thus, hardware wallets are one of the most secure methods of storing cryptocurrencies, in addition to being portable.
Ledger
As for using the Nano Ledger S, the first step towards setting up your device is unboxing it and checking if you have received all the accessories with the device. Once you have unboxed your device, you need to configure it and initialize it before being able to use it. The process is quite simple and will hardly take about 20-30 minutes post which you will be set to use your Ledger Nano S device. This video does a pretty good job at explaining how the setup works.
Trezor
As for Trezor, installing is really simple. To properly install it users should attach the unit to the computer. After that continue with installing the bridge which allows the Trezor to join with the computer. The first step is to connect the Trezor to device’s USB slot with the cable given in the box. After that, go to myTrezor.com and proceed with installing the browser extension. Trezor can also be used on Android or an iPhone, or on a Windows or Mac computer. Now, initiate the extension and myTrezor will direct you to pick a PIN. After this, you will notice nine buttons but the numbers are hidden. After this, users should check the Trezor’s screen to recognize which numbers are in which place because it switches every time. Now set the PIN. Shortly after, Trezor should present a 24-word wallet “seed”. In short, one word at a time. Note down this seed and save it carefully. If your Trezor device malfunctions or is lost, you can utilize the seed to reconstruct the complete wallet. This video explains how to set up your trezor quite well.
First on the list we have Dash’s own Dash Core wallet.
Dash Core
Dash Core is a full-featured Dash wallet and P2P client, including InstantSend, PrivateSend, governance and masternode management features. It keeps a full copy of the blockchain and offers an RPC console. It’s a great wallet if you’re a large DASH holder and need to constantly monitor the status of your masternode among other things.
Another two great choices for desktop wallets would be either Jaxx or Exodus.
Jaxx
What's really great about jaxx.io is that it doesn’t store the private keys on its servers but on the device of your choosing. Another reason to love Jaxx is the cross platform functionality. It is available on 9 different platforms and can be interlinked with all these platforms which means that the same balances and wallet is available when a different device is being used.
Exodus
Another good example of a desktop wallet that supports DASH is Exodus, which supports numerous other cryptocurrencies along with DASH and is pretty straightforward and easy to use. Just download the app from the official site(exodus.io) and get straight into creating your wallet. Exodus stores your Private Keys on the machine you choose and not on any server, providing you with a relative peace of mind when it comes to the security of your coins.
For web-based wallets, we have Guarda and Magnum. Guarda is a custody-free multiplatform cryptocurrency wallet with a user-friendly interface designed to store, manage, transfer and receive digital assets.
Guarda
Along with DASH, Guarda Wallet currently supports over 40 most popular blockchains and thousands of their tokens. All the currencies can be purchased within the wallet with a bank card. The users can also exchange currencies via a built-in exchange service and make fast crypto transactions.
Guarda Wallet is non-custodial, and the user’s personal data or private keys are not stored by the company.
Magnum
Magnum is a light and anonymous web wallet for managing more than 700 crypto assets. Users have full control over their private keys, and they do not need to create an account.
CEX.io
CEX.io is one of the oldest exchanges around and a great way to buy DASH with credit card. The company supplies both a trading platform and brokerage services for Bitcoin, Ethereum, DASH as well as a plethora of other cryptocurrencies. CEX.io allows you to buy cryptocurrency using your credit card, a wire transfer or a SEPA transfer (if you live in the EU). The site supplies two ways for purchasing crypto – a trading platform and a brokerage service. It also offers a trading platform with margin options, including for DASH. As far as DASH credit card purchases go, CEX.io is the only site we could trust. If you happen to have any BTC on the side or plan on buying, you can certainly use either Bitfinex or Dash, which are both reputable exchanges that offer DASH/BTC trading pairs.
