Leigh Cuen
Aug 23, 2018 at 04:01 UTC
It's easy to see why Zimbabwean entrepreneur James Saruchera wants to use cryptocurrency to circumnavigate inflation.
As a university student in South Africa, Saruchera dropped classes and worked multiple jobs when inflation in his homeland made it impossible to remit school fees. His parents later lost their savings and pension investments after another bout of hyperinflation.
Yet when Saruchera founded his payments startup in February 2017, after years of researching different blockchain networks, he made what many in the crypto community might consider a surprising choice. He picked dash to be the backbone of the business.
Founded in 2014 as darkcoin before adopting a more regulator-friendly brand, dash is best known for its optional privacy features and boasts a market capitalization in the lower half of the top 20 cryptos. It's drawn a fair bit of criticism for its cryptography practices and the way the core team has been run as a for-profit venture from day one.
But dash has at least one thing going for it: Its team has figured out how to win over entrepreneurs in the developing world like Saruchera.
His startup, Kuvacash, was seeded with a grant for roughly $550,000 worth of the cryptocurrency from the Dash Treasury DAO, a pool of mining rewards that allows dash fans worldwide to submit proposals and vote on which ideas get funding.
Saruchera said:
Now, he's getting ready to pilot Kuvacash's mobile payments app with 100 users in October and negotiating with the government of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, to build a dash-powered transit app for an upcoming tram line.
While cryptocurrency adherents have been evangelizing the technology in poorer countries since the early days of bitcoin, few projects if any have done so as aggressively as dash.
The Dash Treasury DAO alone has granted over $33 million worth of dash since 2015, $2.3 million of which went to projects in developing countries such as Zimbabwe, Ghana and Kenya. That number is clearly ramping up as the community shifts strategies. Out of 27 grants in the developing world, 20 of those proposals received funding over the past 12 months. The August 2018 payout alone is expected to give around $920,273 worth of dash, including grants for programs in Venezuela and Brazil.
In addition to providing this startup capital, the project has set it itself apart in these markets by offering support for entrepreneurs, starting with their first transaction and wallet all the way to launching a dash-oriented business. Protocol developers also improve the underlying software based on feedback from such diverse users.
And despite the lingering controversies over dash's technical infrastructure, these efforts to serve marginalized communities are starting to gain notice.
"I have heard about and admire their outreach," said Ray Youssef, CEO of Paxful, a bitcoin exchange that focuses on emerging markets.
Boots on the ground
The Dash Core startup, which stewards the dash network, learned .......https://www.coindesk.com/dash-crypto-venezuela-zimbabwe/
