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Dash moves into DeFi

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@karangautam
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Dash was launched in 2014 as a fork of Bitcoin and it was named Xcoin initially. The project was founded by software developers Evan Duffield and Kyle Hagan. Dash was designed as digital cash and it aimed to offer instant transactions with nominal fees. Since the launch, there have been a lot of developments related to the Dash project. Dash has a two-tier network with incentivized nodes and it includes ‘Masternodes’. The project was really one of the pioneers in the industry for its Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) implementation and Masternodes. ‘InstantSend’ allows instant settlement of payment in the network but Dash has another key feature – private transactions. The ‘Privatesend’ technique of Dash offers anonymous transactions. The technique basically merges different transactions to obscure the trail of the funds. The anonymity of Dash transactions is a bit debatable but Dash has survived many bear cycles and proved its acceptance all over the world as a medium of payment.

Dash is quite cool as a digital payment network. The store-of-value of the native coin is decent enough and fast transactions make it effective. A Dash holder can earn a return by running a master node and holding DASH. To run a master node, an average of 1000 DASH units are needed. It is also possible to opt for pool staking or staking on centralized exchanges. Overall, Dash is a promising cryptocurrency to hodl but it needs good liquidity. In today’s era, high liquidity is impossible without taking part in the high voltage DeFi or decentralized finance movement. But people love to stake Dash due to the decent staking reward and staking makes an asset illiquid. It is difficult to choose between staking and liquidity.

StakeHound is an organization that is focused to bring staking and DeFi together. It eliminates the hard choice between earning staking rewards and liquidity. StakeHound basically offers a centralized bridge that brings staked assets to Ethereum DeFi. As per their website, the assets are stored under institutional-grade custody solutions, insured and can be audited in real-time on the ledger. $35B is the size of the current staking market and decentralized bridges are yet to obtain public trust. StakeHound has huge scope to tap this market. DASH NEXT and Dash Core Group have partnered with this organization to launch the ERC-20 wrapped token stDASH. The news was declared by this official blog post of Dash. Yes, it is basically Ethereum wrapped staked DASH.

The method is attractive for the DASH investors as they can stake their DASH on StakeHound platform and convert their staked DASH to ERC20 stDASH and take part in the lending-borrowing activity of DeFi. The staked DASH can be audited in a real-time ledger and it earns staking rewards (even just 1 stDASH earns staking rewards instead of 1000 DASH). The platform distributes staking rewards as additional stDASH to the users. The newly rewarded stDASH tokens can also be used in DeFi.

stDASH is supposed to be listed on AMM based DEXs like Uniswap and Sushiswap very soon. Once listed, anybody can provide liquidity to the concerned pools and earn trading fees. Once liquidity is provided to a pool, LP tokens are received. These LP tokens can be staked in different yield farming farms of AMM based platforms and earn additional farming rewards. It is interesting to note that while you do all these activities, you keep on earning staking rewards on the platform of StakeHound as you deposited original DASH coins there. stDASH testnet has been already launched and you can participate now.

Payment focused Dash is not the first project to join StakeHound. Previously NEM, Firo, Horizen, Divi joined the platform to take advantage of the secured Ethereum bridge offered by the platform. It is really difficult for an EVM non-compatible cryptocurrency to take part in Ethereum DeFi without the help of a centralized custodian. Most probably we need to rely upon such solutions till the time we get workable real cross-chain DeFi protocols.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta