Project Three Billion: Dash Is Ready for Global Adoption

Three billion people.

That’s about the number of people we can get to live on decentralized money.
Not tomorrow. Not 10 years from now.

Today.

A little background first.

Dash’s Killer App: Spending Crypto

Dash is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies. We’ve been focused for 10 years on providing decentralized digital money that’s private, instant, affordable, secure, and easy to use. It just works. During this time, we’ve been honing and improving our tech, getting everything ready for true mass adoption. That time is now near.

But it’s not easy to completely change global dependence on the fiat and banking system. This requires completely rebuilding the global economic infrastructure from the ground up, or, in the meantime, bootstrapping new connections to the old system. Which we’ve done.

If you download the DashPay wallet, you can see for yourself how Dash is enabling easy payments for real-world goods and services, including heavy discounts.

And now that we’ve done that, we’re finally achieving that necessary bootstrap to cover the hardest problem: bills.

The Hardest Adoption Hurdle: Bills

Over the years, we’ve seen all kinds of goods and services get traded for cryptocurrency: pizzas, alpaca socks, VPNs, questionable material on the dark web, and much more. We’ve seen prepaid debit cards, digital gift card vendors, and more act as go-betweens to help people spend their crypto as currency.

Unfortunately, probably the most important aspect of living all on cryptocurrency, paying bills, has also proven to be one of the more complicated ones. This is because they’re usually tied to individual identity and accounts (rather than being a cash-buyable anonymous good or service), which meant interfacing with legacy financial services. Many of these have historically been hostile to crypto.

For a long time, Dash users in many countries could buy a wide variety of things for small purchases and expenses, but they still had to rely largely on their bank to pay for the largest and most essential expenses. This meant Dash was a novelty for some and true digital money for a very few select users who were able to create personalized local peer-to-peer economies, but it was hardly money for the world.

We Are Solving Bill Pay

Much of this challenge has changed in recent years. Thanks to the rising demand to use crypto as money, and a handful of innovative companies, many users around the world are able to pay all their bills with crypto: utilities, mortgage, rent, internet, phone, and more. These companies allow you to add your current billers, pay in crypto, and they will pay your bill on your behalf. And all the best of these services accept Dash.

The most established of these is Swapin, which allows euro-using Europeans to seamlessly pay their bills with Dash. Bitrefill covers El Salvador. Spritz extends this support to Americans. Zypto allows users in the US, Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Egypt, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Malaysia, and more to pay their bills in Dash. Notably, in some areas like the US, now there’s redundancy with bill pay providers, so if one company encounters an issue, there are fallback options.

Notably, all of these services are noncustodial, meaning users need not risk funds to custodial exposure, but can pay from wallets only they control.

Almost 3 Billion People Can Pay Bills With Dash

Adding up the potential customers of all these services rounds us up to roughly three billion people.

That’s right: billions of people, nearly half of the world’s population, can pay for the majority of their expenses with Dash.

This means that Dash is no longer a niche tool for theoretical use cases. Dash can work as money for the world now. If nearly half the world is able to use it to pay for some of the very most critical, and historically difficult to pay, bills, then most of the war for adoption is over. Digital cash may not have won yet, but we can win. It’s within reach now.

Enabling, Then Obsoleting, Remittances

As a side note, these essential bill pay services enable easy remittances, especially for the underbanked, in much of the world. Historically, because of their global and permissionless nature, cryptocurrencies have been touted as a key use case for remittances. Many services have indeed leveraged them for this use case, but there are some key challenges preventing this from catching on at scale.

First and foremost, there are extra costs and complexities associated with the fiat currency part of the crypto remittance angle: the sender must buy cryptocurrency to send, and the recipient must sell it in order to pay bills. Second, in the time between the acquisition and resale of the cryptocurrency, volatility has the potential to impact the price, causing the potential for value loss (although the rise of widespread stablecoin use has mitigated some of this). And finally, technical knowledge barriers exist on both sides of the remittance, but particularly on the recipient side. A younger laborer or other migrant worker may or may not be able to easily acquire the technological skills necessary to acquire and handle crypto, but their elderly family at home very well may not.

Cutting out half of the “crypto remittance sandwich” means that only one party needs to handle the technical skills and logistics for the transaction: a user can buy or earn Dash and then immediately pay the bills of their family back in their home country, and maybe even buy gift credit to major grocery stores and so on. This significantly cuts down on the complexity involved in the remittance, but also removes almost all volatility risk due to the immediate time frame under which the entire loop can take place.

At the end of the day, we may be able to end the concept of remittances entirely. If enough users start to pay their families’ bills back home with crypto, eventually those families can learn how to use it as well. Then, the crypto itself can act as money with no need for any special action: workers can simply earn or buy it, then send it home immediately, as easily as if they sent it to their own roommate. Then, sending money across borders simply becomes sending money. The whole world connected under a universal, efficient, financial and payments standard.

How Many Users Can We Reach?

Just because we can reach billions of people doesn’t necessarily mean we will. But we also don’t have to.

Assume that, on average, only 10% of the population of the currently-supported countries for our bill pay partners is even eligible or applicable. This could be for a variety of reasons including lack of access to proper technology, individual life circumstances, close business relationships with legacy finance and remittance companies, and so on. That’s still 300 million candidates, close to the population of the United States.

If only 10% of applicable candidates for regular Dash usage are reached and are interested, that’s still 30 million, equivalent to the population of Malaysia. If only one third of those end up following through and becoming Dash users, that’s now 10 million, or the population of Portugal.

If we can onboard just 0.3% of the population of countries where Dash can be used to cover all major bills, that’s 10 million additional Dash users.

The Effects of 10 Million New Users

If we have 10 million new Dash users paying regular bills and expenses, let’s estimate the transaction load. Assume each user averages five transactions per week. This assumes frequent, but not total, usage, or about three payments or purchases per week (one bill and two grocery or other similar purchases), with two extra transactions for acquiring the Dash and maybe transferring to or from a friend or other wallet. That’s roughly 7.14 million additional transactions per day, 50 million per week, 200 million per month, 2.6 billion per year.

Scaling research from Arizona State University many years ago showed that Dash was capable of comfortably processing over three times that volume with hardware, bandwidth, and software available then. In the many years since, research has shown UTXO model blockchains like Dash are able to process transaction volumes that are orders of magnitude higher than that.

Redefining Money for the World

In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto set out to create the best permissionless money and payments system that had been imagined up until that time: peer-to-peer digital cash for the world. Dash has been working tirelessly on fulfilling that mission for the modern age.

Over eleven years into this quest, and we finally have something that not only works well enough for the world to use, but that much of the world can practically, actionably, use as money today.

We’re bringing digital cash to the world. Join us!

Live on Dash Worldwide

Please check out the services below to facilitate living entirely on Dash. Any additional questions, feel free to reach out to this account, or at [email protected].

Bill Pay – Spritz (US), Swapin (EU), Bitrefill (El Salvador), Zypto (US, Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Egypt, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Malaysia)

Gift Cards – DashSpend (inside the DashPay wallet), Bitrefill

Prepaid Cards – Zypto, Spritz, Bitrefill

Direct-Accepting Merchants – DashPay app

Buy Dash – Topper (inside the DashPay wallet), many exchanges worldwide

Author: Joel Valenzuela