Dash-to-Anything: Send or Receive Any Crypto as Dash in the DashPay Wallet

We’ve launched a key feature, Dash-to-Anything, that will make your Dash so much more useful in a world where the cryptocurrency use case is increasingly fragmented.

The goal is for you to be able to, essentially, receive any digital asset and have it show up as Dash in your wallet, and send Dash to anyone and they will receive whatever asset they wanted. By doing this, the user can just have Dash and not have to juggle multiple tokens or wallets, and have the maximum utility possible.

The Key Ingredients

Dash-to-Anything isn’t as simple as building a feature in a wallet. In order to truly ship it, we need a unique collection of ingredients that are tricky to achieve all together. Thankfully, the hard work is done on that part, and we’re ready to start assembling.

InstantSend

The underpinning of all of this is InstantSend: Dash’s instant transaction functionality. This renders payments fully irreversible in about a second. This is critical to the feature because otherwise the friction is too great as a user won’t be able to access another asset in a timely manner.

When everything is on-chain, the core technology needs to work. DEXes and other services can’t afford to take risks and process transactions as soon as they see them. They need security guarantees. And Dash is still one of the very few that provides them.

DEXes

Next, we needed DEX integrations. Several years ago we had none, so we made this a priority. Now Dash can be swapped in one go to and from dozens of assets on purely decentralized rails.

Yes, we could have done this by relying on centralized swappers, companies that provide an instant exchange service. However, that isn’t reliable enough for a flagship feature for Dash. We’re a decentralized currency, and we need decentralized features. We needed an exchange that will always work for all users everywhere, and won’t identify or censor. “Just works” is the name of the game, and DEXes are a requirement to credibly make this promise.

DEX redundancy

Finally, one DEX isn’t good enough. We needed redundancy.

Cross-chain decentralized exchanges are complex creations. They must be architected perfectly or they can fail, losing money in an irrecoverable way. As such, sometimes they break, pause, or have glitches. Again, while this is perfectly understandable, it’s unacceptable to have our shining feature’s robustness hinge on a single technology.

To this end, Dash is now supported on the top three decentralized exchange protocols: NEAR Intents, the Maya Protocol, and THORChain very soon. Very few other assets can claim the same. Now, if any one or even two of these DEXes pauses for whatever reason, the Dash-to-Anything feature persists.

In addition, we’re also exploring ways of adding in support for centralized swapping services to reach the assets not covered by a DEX, in particular things like the Bitcoin Lightning network. Because they depend on companies and custodians, we don’t see this as nearly as valuable or aligned, but it can be a great value-add.

The Grand Vision

Dash-to-Anything isn’t just a great feature. It’s a precondition for our greater goal of becoming decentralized digital cash for the world.

Network effects are everything. The US dollar is so powerful because of its utility in just about every corner of the planet. Dash has everything it needs on the fundamental level to achieve this, but without being a global, universally-accepted and useful money, it’s an uphill battle.

While we’re growing Dash’s usefulness as money around the world, Dash-to-Anything essentially allows us to cheat. Anywhere any of the hundreds or thousands of other crypto assets is accepted or preferred, Dash is as well. If a country only has penetration in Bitcoin adoption, no matter: Dash can work just as well. If a payout can only be received in a stablecoin, that’s as good as receiving Dash directly. Suddenly, in one move, we plug right into the global digital financial system as if we were the first-class citizen.

We’re achieving the enviable goal of chain abstraction around a unified digital cash. Keep watching us as we build out this killer feature.