Dash (DASH)

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Historical price evolution of Dash

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Dash was born on 18th January 2014 as XCoin, created by programmer Evan Duffield, who had been an early adopter of Bitcoin. Duffield developed this project as a fork of Litecoin after seeing his proposals for privacy and speed improvements to the Bitcoin protocol rejected by the Bitcoin Core developers. However, the launch was marked by a technical controversy: a bug inherited from Litecoin in the difficulty adjustment algorithm allowed approximately 1.9 million coins to be mined in the first 48 hours, representing 10% of the total supply and concentrating wealth amongst the early miners. Although Duffield offered to relaunch the project, the community rejected this proposal.

On 28th January 2014, just ten days after launch, XCoin was rebranded as Darkcoin to emphasise its privacy functions. However, this name generated unwanted associations with darknet markets and illegal activities. In June 2014, the project introduced one of its most distinctive characteristics: masternodes, special nodes that require locking 1,000 DASH as collateral. These masternodes enabled advanced functionalities such as InstantSend, which allows confirmations in less than 2 seconds, and PrivateSend, an optional coin mixing system for greater privacy, in addition to participating in protocol governance.

On 25th March 2015, the project underwent a new rebrand, changing from Darkcoin to Dash (Digital Cash). This change sought to distance itself from associations with the darknet and reposition the cryptocurrency as digital money for everyday use. During 2017, Dash experienced its greatest boom, reaching an all-time high of approximately $1,600 driven by the general bull market and its listing on Binance, which brought its maximum market capitalisation to around $12,000 million. That same year, in April, Duffield moved to an advisory role and the Dash Core Group assumed leadership of the project.

Between 2017 and 2018, Dash achieved real adoption in Venezuela, where hyperinflation of the bolívar pushed citizens to seek monetary alternatives, resulting in more than 2,500 merchants accepting DASH. During this period, the project also established a blockchain research laboratory at Arizona State University. However, between 2018 and 2025, "privacy coins" faced growing regulatory pressure, with European and global exchanges beginning to delist assets with privacy functions. Gate.io removed DASH at the end of 2024, Bybit removed the DASH/USDT pair in 2025, and the European Union included privacy coins on its list of problematic assets under MiCA regulation. By 2025, the price of DASH oscillated between $20 and $40, 97% below its all-time high, although the project continued to be active with its DAO governance system and the development of solutions for decentralised exchanges.

Dash functions through a two-tier architecture that combines traditional mining with a network of specialised nodes. The first tier consists of a network of miners that utilise the Proof-of-Work system with the X11 algorithm, a sequence of 11 hash functions designed specifically for greater energy efficiency and initial resistance to ASIC mining. The second tier is formed by the masternodes, nodes that must lock 1,000 DASH as collateral to participate in the network and that provide advanced services in exchange for a portion of the block rewards.

The masternodes enable three main functionalities: InstantSend, which allows transaction confirmations in approximately 1.3 seconds through consensus between masternodes; PrivateSend, an optional fund mixing system based on CoinJoin to increase privacy; and ChainLocks, a protection mechanism against 51% attacks through the signing of blocks by the masternodes. The maximum supply of DASH is limited to 18.9 million tokens, with a reward distribution that allocates 45% to miners, 45% to masternodes and 10% to the DAO treasury.

Dash's decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) utilises that 10% of the block rewards to finance its own development without depending on external investors. Anyone can submit funding proposals that are voted on by masternode operators, creating a decentralised governance system that allows the network to self-finance and make decisions about its technical and strategic evolution.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.