This past weekend, Dash surpassed $1,000 for the first time, and today the digital currency reached - and passed - $1,500 per coin. The last few months have been particularly kind to Dash; after a two month period of consolidation, Dash began to rise rapidly in early November.
November 6 saw Dash lift off from a base of $274; just six weeks later, the currency reached a high of $1,570 today. Dash began 2017 at a price of only $11.26, bringing about 139-fold gains so far this year.
Software update and bigger blocks
On November 8, Dash released its anticipated software upgrade - Dash 12.2. The new version of Dash included a number of fixes, code to increase the blocksize to 2 MB and other changes that will be needed for the project’s major Evolution release in 2018. Core developer UdjinM6 wrote of the 12.2 update:
The most notable changes are:
- DIP0001 implementation (which is a 2MB block upgrade);
- Transaction fee reduction 10x (activates via DIP0001 activation);
- InstantSend vulnerability fix (activates via DIP0001 lock in);
- PrivateSend improvement which should allow user to have mixed funds available much faster;
- Various RPC changes;
- Lots of backports from Bitcoin Core and refactoring of our own legacy code which should improve performance and make code more reliable and easier to review;
- Experimental HD wallet with BIP39/BIP44 support.
The update also introduced the code for bigger blocks which had already been approved by a vote of masternode owners in 2016. Dash’s blocksize increase activated a month later, on December 5.