The Dash cryptocurrency team is at a crossroads due to a dilemma caused by the delisting of the coin from the Bittrex trading platform. Recall that last week, the exchange announced the end of XRP trading amid friction between the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with Ripple.
Right after that, Bittrex representatives also decided to get rid of anonymous cryptocurrencies. However, the Dash developers disagree with this statement: the project team stated that the coin is not anonymous and in this matter is almost no different from the same Bitcoin.
Note that the key representatives of the private cryptocurrency niche are Monero and Zcash. At the same time, in November last year, using XMR, 118 times more anonymous transactions were carried out in comparison with Zcash.
These are transactions in which the sender, the recipient and the transfer amount are hidden.
What’s happening with the Dash cryptocurrency?
The delisting from Bittrex had a significant impact on the value of the altcoin. In the past two weeks alone, its value has dropped by at least 15 percent.
Today the cryptocurrency is trading at $ 88. Over the year, the cryptocurrency showed 92 percent growth, while the daily trading volume of the coin is the equivalent of $ 521 million with a capitalization of 882 million.
Dash trading on Bittrex is still ongoing, and the delisting itself is scheduled for January 15th. In addition to Dash, Monero and Zcash will also disappear from the marketplace.
The Dash team said on Twitter that they have already contacted Bittrex and are trying to resolve the issue. Here is the developer’s line from Cointelegraph.
From a technical point of view, Dash has no more privacy features than Bitcoin, which makes the “confidential coin” label a mistake for our project. We reached out to Bittrex to request a meeting with their team. Hopefully the problem will be resolved soon.
That is, in this case, they directly indicate that cryptocurrency is not a project that focuses on privacy and anonymity. In essence, they abandon their own positioning – albeit the old one – and point to the equality of opportunity for Dash with Bitcoin in order to save themselves from possible problems.
However, this positioning is not so clean. In particular, archival snapshots from the 2017 Dash Foundation website advertise DASH as “the world’s first privacy-focused cryptocurrency,” meaning that this reputation is not out of the blue. The Dash Foundation now lists DASH as the «leading payment cryptocurrency.»
In his recent tweet about the delisting, DashPay CEO Ryan Taylor also minimized cryptocurrency privacy features. Here is a quote from him.
The PrivateSend feature in Dash is just a proprietary CoinJoin implementation, not storage related. Leading industry experts such as Chainalysis and Perkins Coie agree.
Accordingly, here he also used the reputation of other market players to negate the image of the blockchain project.
While the seeming turn of events drew ridicule and criticism on Twitter, supporters noted that Dash published a guide to cryptocurrency privacy features in August. In a blog post on the official Dash website, Taylor wrote that «regulators are concerned that exchanges may not be able to comply with KYC / AML rules for privacy-enhanced coin transactions» because DASH «is often found on privacy-enhanced coin lists.» …
We believe that it is hardly possible to save Dash from delisting. Nevertheless, the management of the exchange made the appropriate decision, which means that before that, an analysis of the features of cryptocurrency projects was carried out. Accordingly, one renunciation of the title of anonymous coin will not be enough.
Therefore, owners of Dash coins need to make a choice: keep them further or get rid of them. Taking into account what is happening with Ripple and XRP’s cryptocurrency, there is still a possibility of interference by governments or various departments in the life of blockchain projects.
