The privacy-focused cryptocurrency, Dash, has found Venezuela to be one of its largest markets, as over a hundred merchants have begun to accept Dash as a means of facilitating payment.
In a phone call with Business Insider, the CEO of Dash Core Group, Ryan Taylor, revealed, “earlier this year, Venezuela became our number two market even ahead of China and Russia, which are of course huge into cryptocurrency right now. We are seeing tens of thousands of wallet downloads from the country each month”
Coinedict reported earlier this month that Bitcoin (BTC) had observed an increase in trading owing to the rampant hyperinflation currently making waves across Venezuela. Later on the 18th of August, we also reported that the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, planned to peg the value of the country’s cryptocurrency Petro against the value of it’s new “sovereign” Bolivar.
Ryan Taylor commented on the rapid rise of merchants that were coming onboard the Dash train and said, “We’ve seen 94 new Venezuelan merchants added to DiscoverDash.com since last week, which is about double the normal rate of about 50 merchants per week [over] the last couple of months”.
Taylor didn’t shy away from naming some of the more noteworthy brands have begun to accept Dash and mentioned Subway and Calvin Klein among the list of merchants. Chris Koerner, a blockchain advisor, also posted a tweet regarding the rise of Dash in Venezuela.
One of the many reasons why Dash has seen an increase in adoption as compared to the leader of the pack Bitcoin is the low fees and near-instant transactions that Dash entails. According to a blog post by Dash on the 2nd of March, Dash was only behind Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of market value. Dash saw its value peak around December 2017, reaching a high of over 1500 USD. According to CoinMarketCap, the altcoin is currently being traded at around 137 USD.
