Welcome!

This proposal is for the first quarter 2025 of the Dash Growth business development and marketing initiative

.Last quarter recap

In September we presented at HiveFest in Split, Croatia, on Dash Evolution. Travel and accommodation was provided by Hive and did not cost Dash anything. We are exploring a number of strategic partnerships as a result of this. The full presentation can be found here.

Also as a result, we launched a partnership with social media site INLEO (which runs on the Hive blockchain), which now supports an option to sign up with a Dash wallet, pay for features in Dash, and earn in Dash for social media postings. We launched PR and marketing campaign with INLEO which involved a press release and numerous social postings from our end, and the INLEO team matched our spend with advertising on X and other platforms. This has already led to hundreds of new user signups. If you wish to join INLEO, please use this link.

We are continuing to work on our upcoming Brave advertisement campaign, which has been delayed due to development delays in the Dash wallets. We will report on the campaign as soon as it goes live, likely the second week of January.

This past month we appeared on the podcast of Zypto, a crypto super app and bill pay solution, and secured an agreement to add Dash to the bill pay solution next year. Dash was also added to crypto yield tracking service iYield.

We spoke to hardware wallet provider Trezor following the announcement that Dash would be removed from the updated version of the Trezor Suite interface next year. We explored other software options, such as Exodus, for existing Dash Trezor users to use. We are in the process of partnering with and strengthening relationships with numerous other hardware wallet providers.

We also contacted the advertising department of X (formerly Twitter) to discuss advertising opportunities for Dash on the platform. We are in the final steps of obtaining a legal opinion letter which was requested by X before being able to advertise.

We facilitated a merchant listing API data partnership between CurPay, a Dash-accepting merchant point-of-sale provider, and Cryptwerk, a cryptocurrency merchant listing site. As we facilitate more similar partnerships, we hope to be able to draw on this as a data source for the merchant map in the DashPay wallet.

Finally, we also did promotional spaces with iYield, ChangeNOW, and CoinRabbit, and appeared on the Retail Roundtable segment of CryptoCoinMindSet, as well as WDEV radio, and appeared on numerous Xcohost and Web3 Global X spaces.

As always, we provide monthly updates in the community newsletter. Please sign up on Dash.org for monthly updates.

2024 overview

In 2024 we came into a vacuum where no meaningful marketing or business development had taken place in some time. Most of our contacts, partnerships, tools, and processes had to be rebuilt from scratch, which took a majority of the year.

First, we had no reasonable way to onboard a new company to recognize InstantSend transactions without running and configuring their own full nodes. Thankfully we now have an API to recommend which recognizes instant locks.

In particular, we didn’t have an effective means of onboarding users and merchants. Since then, we have partnered with merchant tool providers for both fully-regulated (for both Europe and the US) and open-source/noncustodial tools for easily accepting Dash. We have also partnered with additional spending tool providers for Dash users across the world. In particular, the DashSpend functionality which was built into the wallet earlier this year was unable to launch due to an issue with our gift card provider. We have now signed agreements with two additional gift card providers, and now are looking forward to debuting the DashSpend feature in the new year.

Our biggest delay has revolved around the Evolution promotion. We were thankfully able to promote the initial release of Evolution in July and secure coverage in many major publications such as CoinDesk, however our planned ad campaigns were delayed due to circumstances outside of our control, namely delays in releasing and stabilizing Evolution, delays and technical issues with the wallets, and major issues with the website which prevented the timely release of landing pages. Even now, the Android wallet can’t make more than a few contacts without running out of credits, and a credit top-up feature is not yet active, so we’re evaluating whether to wait for this feature to be implemented before rolling out our major ad campaigns. That being said, we do have landing pages ready to go and invoicing taken care of, so an early-January launch for the first campaigns should be doable. We have commissioned 8 videos explaining Evolution, which have scripts and voiceovers finalized and are currently in progress.

We formed a strategic partnership with the Hive blockchain community, which has already paid off with the INLEO integration. There are other partnerships with Hive-based projects in the works as well to expand merchant adoption and options to earn Dash.

We have made good progress on some of our most significant growth blockages, namely the lack of a New York BitLicense and the integration blockage into Flexa that it represents (among others), as well as issues with exchange listings in Europe due to MiCA. We are currently engaging with an EU law firm that specializes in crypto law, and hope to have a legal opinion letter related to Dash’s legality in Europe by the end of the year. We also have a conversation with a major New York-regulated exchange this week, which could potentially lead to a BitLicense solution. And finally, Flexa has hinted at a possible technical workaround for onboarding Dash, which would enable us to be supported even without solving our BitLicense issues.

We are in contact with several different stablecoin providers, centralized as well as decentralized, in addition to Bitcoin-denominated tokens, and are ready to start moving on integrations as soon as fungible tokens are built into the protocol early next year.

Finally, we have made significant advances in finding a solution to significantly overhaul the usability and strength of Dash’s privacy mechanism in a way that doesn’t provide any additional regulatory complications. We have also secured a grant from the Power Up Privacy nonprofit for at least six months of full-time developer funding, and have found reputable external developers able to implement this overhaul. Because of the scope of this grant, it’s fair to say that we have potentially brought nearly as much money into the Dash ecosystem as we have spent.

Overall, we’re in a dramatically better position at the end of 2024 than we were at the beginning of the year, and are very excited to see where Dash can go in 2025.

What's ahead

After the immense amount of preparatory work in 2024, we are now in a strong position to promote Dash to end users, businesses, and developers (as soon as an adequate SDK is released by either DCG, the Incubator, or both).

Cryptocurrencies are difficult to explicitly advertise across many platforms. However, thanks to our partnership with Brave, our progress with X, and newly-formed relationships with many YouTubers and other influencers, we now have many avenues for promotion this year, and expect to be able to onboard many new users.

A big focus coming into 2025 is strengthening Dash's end-user product offerings. We are working on stablecoins, Bitcoin-denominated tokens, multiple spending tools right inside the wallet, building out a reliable merchant map, privacy function usability improvements, and more which we hope to have implemented this year.

We are arranging our speaking and sponsorship opportunities at several conferences this coming year, as well as considering hosting a Dash conference. If you have suggestions for a conference location and date, and are willing to help out, please let us know.

Ask

We are continuing our monthly ask to 415 Dash. This revised ask was enough to sustain our two full-time salaries as long as the price remained above $25. The price has recently improved above this level, however we would prefer to replenish our reserve and see more price stability before lowering the ask again and re-entering an unsustainability zone.

Coverage and media appearance links

(to be added soon)