In January 2023, the crypto market reversed its continued decline, bringing hope to the crypto community. Meanwhile, many now speculate that crypto might reach a new high in terms of market cap. During the month, Bitcoin saw a surge of 36.7%, enabling the recovery of other cryptos out there. Thanks to such a promising start, as well as the scheduled halving of two long-standing projects: LTC and DASH, many prominent crypto analysts are now fully confident in the market’s performance, despite the lingering impact of the market turbulence last year.
A new survey from Nickel Digital Asset Management, a European investment management company, shows that nearly 90% of 200 institutional investors in countries including the US, UK, Germany, and Singapore predict that the BTC price will go up this year, and 65% of them believe that Bitcoin could still hit $100,000 over the long run.
Meanwhile, DASH, the tech-improved version of Bitcoin, has surged by 40% in the past 30 days, exceeding $66, and it has been a long time since the last time DASH scored such a satisfying growth record in March 2022. It should be noted that although DASH is one of the earliest cryptos and the first crypto aimed at protecting user privacy, due to the impact of privacy regulations DASH is no match to other cryptos such as Ethereum and Litecoin in terms of market recognition, and many investors have no knowledge of DASH.
About DASH
Formerly known as XCoin, the crypto was introduced in January 2014 and evolved into today’s DASH after several name changes. Unlike Bitcoin, the total supply of DASH is indefinite, as it is impossible to determine the proportion of the 10% DASH supply reserved for block rewards in its budget proposal that will actually be allocated, which depends on future voting results. Nonetheless, based on calculations targeting two extreme scenarios, the final DASH supply will be between 17.74 million and 18.92 million, and its circulating supply now stands at about 11.12 million.
Source: https://docs.dash.org/en/stable/docs/user/introduction/features.html
With a block time of 2.6 minutes and a block capacity of approximately 2M, the first layer of the DASH network is capable of processing approximately 56 transactions per second. Moreover, as is the case with Bitcoin, miners in the DASH network also package transactions into blocks. On the second layer, the master node network engages in the consensus confirmation of blocks. The master node validation and InstantSend significantly simplify the process of transaction confirmation and allow the network to confirm transactions in just two seconds.
In addition to traditional PoW mining, miners can also earn DASH by running and maintaining special servers called master nodes. On August 13, 2020, the DASH network approved a proposal to change the block reward split between miners and master nodes from 50/50 to 40/60.
As DASH faces imminent halving, is it still an ideal mining target?
To begin with, DASH uses the X11 algorithm and supports mining with CPUs/GPUs/ASICs. At the moment, ASIC mining represents the most efficient way to mine DASH, and the rise of X11 ASIC mining machines has also led to the rapid growth of the DASH hashrate, making it difficult for CPU/GPU miners to make a profit. Right now, mainstream ASIC mining machines for DASH mining include StrongU U6, FusionSilicon X7, and Antminer D5. You can check out the returns of these models through the Mining Profit Rankings on the ViaBTC website.
Source: https://www.viabtc.com/tools/miner
We can tell that given the same electricity cost, StrongU U6 delivers satisfying returns, and this mining machine, which was released in 2019, is now sold for $720 to $790 on third-party platforms. Based on the network hashrate of 4.09 PH/s, difficulty of 148.5 M, and electricity cost of $0.05/kWh, the payback period for the model is about 318 days.
However, there are only 132 days left until the DASH supply halves, at which time the block reward will be cut to 0.2 DASH. If the DASH price still remains around $65, the daily earnings of miners will diminish. That said, based on DASH’s price performance during the last two halvings on May 12, 2021 and June 30, 2022, DASH halving facilitates price growth.
The DASH halving will not guarantee price growth, but it could catalyze strong performance, which will make DASH mining more profitable. As such, for miners, the DASH halving will be a major date, and all DASH miners should pay more attention to recent news and market trends about DASH.