Dash launches payment app with seven times more vendor locations than Bitcoin

Dash – the digital cash cryptocurrency – has a new payment app for day-to-day commerce transactions with 155,000 vendors and more than 125 online retailers.

These initial Dash commercial partnerships represent seven times more in-store merchant locations than Bitcoin (BTC) globally.

According to the CoinMap.org merchant directory, Bitcoin – the world’s most-used cryptocurrency – is accepted at 22,883 venues worldwide.

In a huge move for cryptocurrency adoption, the DashDirect app has received support from a plethora of major American retailers, many of which are now offering a 12% discount for purchases conducted through the cryptocurrency app.

“DashDirect is a cryptocurrency game-changer for payments, user adoption and merchant acceptance in the United States providing unrivalled utility,” said Mark Mason, Business Relations Manager for Dash.

The list of merchants include large tech retailers such as Best Buy and GameStop, alongside nationwide DIY-supply stores Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Staples.

Other household names include restaurant chains Chili’s, Chipotle, and Subway.

Customer-focused DashDirect follows substantial investments from the Dash Investment Foundation and has been built by CrayPay – an Arizona-based fintech company partnered with Dash Core Group.

Discounts are a primary feature of the new app, with plans to extend and evolve the discount scheme in tandem with userbase growth.

Dash’s Mark Mason explained how the staking feature can be leveraged to passively cover day-to-day needs, highlighting the potential savings of cryptocurrencies over traditional fiat currencies for household spending.

“I personally stake my Dash holdings for 6.57% ROI and spend the new Dash I receive via block-rewards with DashDirect for my everyday spending needs such as groceries via InstaCart, fast-food cravings via DoorDash etc,” he said.

DashDirect is non-custodial. Instead, it connects with users’ official Dash wallets so as to retain control and ownership of 100% of their crypto assets.

What is Dash?

Dash is the leading decentralised payment solution built to support real-life use cases: it is accepted at merchants globally, accessible via 3,300+ ATMs and 100+ exchanges worldwide.

Dash positions itself as a challenger to Bitcoin in the cryptocurrency space, and boasts faster network transaction speeds with a niche lock-in feature that prevents the double-spending problem.

Originally founded as Xcoin in 2014 – as a hard fork (when a new version of a full server node client accepts blocks as valid that previous versions would have rejected as invalid) utilising Bitcoin’s source code, but amended to improve perceived issues.

This lock-in feature is known as Instantx (now called InstantSend) and functions instantly by barring the transaction amount before the block confirmation is processed across the network.

The cryptocurrency was quickly rebranded as DarkCoin to incorporate an innovative privacy feature previously known as DarkSend (now rebranded as PrivateSend).

The anonymity is facilitated by obscuring funds through a coinjoin mixing technique that jumbles multiple transactions from many parties into one bundled transaction on the blockchain.

The coin re-branded as Dash in 2015, the cryptocurrency has exploded in popularity in Venezuela and has former payment partnerships with the Spend mobile app.

At the time of writing Dash was trading at $145 and had a market cap of $1.48B.

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