Dash Latam is the organization that I have been fortunate enough to grow over the last 11 months in order to serve DAO priorities in Latin America, the region where crypto mass adoption is likely to happen first due to existing telecom infrastructure, language, the size of the informal economy and the number of weak governments, among other reasons.
Dash Latam is the Dash Colombia team, the Dash Venezuela Remittances team, as well as new organizations we are cultivating in Peru, Brazil, Mexico and other parts of the world. Dash Latam has active operations across 4 nations in 9 cities: Medellín, Cúcuta, Caracas, Valencia, Los Teques, San Cristóbal, Maturín, Lima and Madrid (Spain). We are 23 full-time people and 9 part-timers or contractors. Dash Latam was founded and is led by me, George Donnelly.
Interconnected and indispensable but ultimately independent of Dash Latam is Dash Retail, a software development project led by Ash Francis and Alex Cox borne from the needs Dash Latam discovered on the ground, working with hundreds of merchants and thousands of consumers. Dash Retail provides bulletproof point of sale (POS) software and other retail acceptance and wallet infrastructure for the Dash ecosystem.
Our Value
Dash Latam is about building real Dash use right now. We build from the ground up, creating new Dash enthusiasts using innovative and persistent marketing strategies that produce active wallet installs, active Dash-accepting merchants, Dash remittances, and, ultimately, real Dash transactions. Check out our new transaction tracker, powered by Dash Retail.
We are on a mission to make the Dash transaction count go up, every day, with real usage — or die trying. With our new transaction tracker, you can easily monitor our progress towards that goal. We are giving Dash remittances the same treatment.
If you want something to be considered currency, digital cash if you will, then businesses have to accept it. You can call yourself digital cash, and you can have exchange listings and mountains of integrations, but if you don’t have regular everyday merchants who actually accept your digital cash, then it is not really digital cash. It is something that might someday be digital cash.
Dash Core Group (DCG) does not do this kind of work. DCG has a corporate vision for Dash and is focused on the protocol and reference implementations of the wallets. DCG does some high-level business development (bizdev). High-level bizdev is about forming relationships in corporate style at high levels with organizations, such as exchanges, that can lead to integrations, such as Dash being a payment option on Bitrefill or CheapAir.com.
Other organizations in the DAO, usually called “embassies”, also focus on high-level bizdev. They work on getting integrations. The speak at conferences. They advertise Dash, which is to say they go out and say how awesome it is. But, with the exception of Dash Thailand, which is a bit of a hybrid, they do not go out and get merchants, like Dash Latam does.
Our value is that we generate real use. We go out into the street and do the hard work that others will not. We are scrappy, we are committed and we work smart. We do not just talk at conferences. We do not just negotiate integrations. We actually go out and get new users. You can have all the software and all the integrations and all the possibilities you want, but until you realize them by bringing in new people, you have only boxed hot air.
#DashLatam is doing something no one else is doing anywhere with crypto.
— George Donnelly (@georgedonnelly) April 27, 2019
We are building real #Dash usage, going out into the streets and restaurants, supermarkets and parks to find, cultivate and educate new #DashPay (crypto) enthusiasts.
Real use now.https://t.co/I0OfSDudIm pic.twitter.com/dLvJn3yo1A
In this process, we also generate ideas for new software. We find bugs in current software. We generate innovative ideas that are on no one else’s radar. We produce media that no one else anywhere else is producing.
If Dash is to be digital cash, the DAO needs Dash Latam. We are the laboratory, we are the template. We are discovering how to achieve crypto mass adoption. Mass adoption is no longer a question of sitting back and waiting for it to happen. We are learning how to make it happen. And we are doing it strategically, inexpensively, with lots of media and transparently.
The Vision
Although there are 3 DAO proposals being discussed here, Dash Colombia [DC, Nexus], Dash Venezuela Remittances [DC, Nexus] and Dash Retail [DC, Nexus], they are in reality 1 big, inter-related project. We broke them out in order to give MNOs the option to pick and choose if need be.
Dash Retail, as I mentioned, is software that permits us to give our merchants Dash-exclusive POS software that is always up and is dead simple to use. Dash Retail also provides the exchange rate information that permits both sender and receiver to see the same, or almost same, fiat amount in their respective wallets when sending and receiving payments. This is called pricing parity and is an idea I came up with and campaigned for. DCG and Kodaxx first implemented it.
So Dash Retail makes everything we do better. It makes every payment that much more frictionless. And in the future it will do so much more. So if we don’t have Dash Retail, we are growing more slowly. Likewise, without Dash Latam’s on the ground adoption efforts, Dash Retail has no client base, nowhere to trial it, and of course nowhere to learn from or be created in the first place.
The Colombia integrated adoption project is what gave genesis to all of this, and despite that they said we could not get merchants and transactions in a stable economy, we did it anyway and continue to thrive. With more than 500 active merchants in fact, we could soon have the #1 merchant adoption project in Dash. But one thing we quickly realized was that there are 2 million Venezuelans in Colombia remitting money home, perhaps the strongest use case for Dash yet.
I invited the Venezuela teams to work with me on remittances. I begged them repeatedly and offered them money to produce videos of Venezuelans buying basic necessities with Dash. There was a uniform refusal across the board and essentially a “Yankee, go home” attitude to boot.
Hence was born Dash Venezuela Remittances (DVR). DVR leverages the coordination, marketing team and collected knowledge base of Colombia to sell Dash as remittances from multiple nations with noteworthy Venezuelan migrant populations. We are already integrating innovative new techniques such as Combo Remittances as well as good old fashioned consumer adoption for the first time, to finally get Dash usage going in Venezuela.
Colombia is the foundation. Retail is the software. Venezuela is the next level up, where we create cross-border trade with Dash. Three fingers of the same hand.
The Future of the DAO
We’re not just thinking about Latin America. We’re not just thinking of copying and paste our current best practices across the globe. We are going beyond that to accelerate adoption using our globally unique expertise together with software to gamify and viralize mass adoption as tomorrow’s best practice.
Towards that end, Ash Francis of Dash Retail and I opened the Dash Ignite discord in early January of 2019. This is a workspace only. Bullshit-free. Dash Ignite is the future of the DAO where thousands of small, independent yet interconnected projects will find a welcome home. They are getting incubation, mentoring, MNO advisory, and help navigating the treasury.
The future of the DAO is not a handful of chummy organizations that benefit from an unspoken gentleman’s agreement to maintain DAO funding, nor much less is it one where a single monolithic black-box organization dominates. The future of the DAO is competition. It is agile, inexpensive and transparent development: not just of software but of business, too. It is the cultivation of hundreds or thousands of proposal owners who will bring to Dash new and unexpected value. Value that will grow the pot so that there is room for everyone, and to spare.
We are looking for allies and partners across the globe with varying skillsets and even complete newbies. Our goal is growth, your growth as well as Dash’s. We have many projects on our agenda. Bring your own as well. But if you like this vision, join us in the Dash Ignite discord.
And please cast all of your votes for our proposals:
If you need help voting your DIP3 masternodes, Edward Stoever’s guide is excellent.
