Design

Dash was designed to allow transactions quickly and to have a swift governance structure in order to overcome the problems in Bitcoin. It splits its rewards into three categories: 45% for the miners, 45% for the masternodes (the computers that have additional services in the network and have a significant investment in Dash tokens), and 10% for the decentralised governance budget, this split based design makes it radically different from Bitcoin.

Governance

Governance is handled through a form of DAO, or decentralised autonomous organisation in which decisions are made on a blockchain through masternodes. Masternodes perform standard node functions like hosting a copy of the blockchain, validating transactions.

In addition to that they also act as shareholders and vote on proposals for improving Dash’s ecosystem. However, lately there have been a lot of issues regarding incompetence of masternodes. This is because anyone with 1,000 Dash Coins (DASH), can become a masternode owner.

Along with masternodes, the system includes standard nodes and miners. The system’s decentralisation has been criticised due to a mishap, which allowed too many coins to be distributed at release. This focussed the wealth to a small group, giving them disproportionate power in decisions over the currency’s future.

Consensus

As of 2018, coins were mined using a proof of work algorithm and the average time to mine a coin was around two and a half minutes. Masternodes in Dash ecosystem provide two additional kinds of transactions.The first is the “InstantSend” which bypasses mining and instead requires a consensus of masternodes to validate a transaction, speeding transactions. The other is the “PrivateSend” which is intended to give users optional consumer-grade privacy; it mixes participating users’ unspent Dash before executing a transaction.