Kraken Adds Support for Dash as Weekly Prices Spike 25%

San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has now enabled support for Dash, a cryptocurrency that has gained nearly 700% in value since the turn of the year.

Dash prices are up nearly 700% since the beginning of 2017.

Kraken has announced the integration of Dash to its trading platform last week, with multiple pairs including fiat options in DASH/USD, DASH/EUR alongside DASH/BTC.

“Kraken is excited to offer Dash on their trading platform and our teams are working closely to ensure clients can begin trading the currency immediately,” revealed Dash VP of business development Daniel Diaz.The Dash Core Team added: “We’re excited to have Dash added to Kraken’s trading platform. As more people begin to take interest in our growth, we hope Dash rises to meet our expectations as one of the most highly traded cryptocurrencies on the platform, while simultaneously providing Kraken clients with the value they’re looking for.”

For withdrawals at Kraken, Dash users will see a fee of 0.005 DASH for normal withdrawals while instant-confirmation withdrawals will incur a fee of 0.01 DASH through Kraken’s ‘Instant-Send’ withdrawal feature.

Dash, which has a supply limit of 22 million coins, has just over 7.23 million in circulation presently. The open source protocol and project, described as a “fork of Bitcoin” by Dash founder Evan Duffield is self-funded and self-governed.

In a previous interview with CCN, Duffield explained the core difference between Dash and Bitcoin:

The most fundamental difference is that in Bitcoin one hundred percent of the block rewards are dedicated to mining and in Dash we believe there are other parts of the network that are important to support directly from the blockchains subsidy so we divide the rewards between miners, full nodes and a small percentage goes to decentralized governance to keep the network self-funded and independent.

While the major altcoins have altogether had a positive valuation trend in 2017, Dash has particularly witnessed a stellar year of significant gains supported by protocol upgrades. The positive outlook among traders began early this year, in anticipation of a sweeping software protocol upgrade. Following the announcement of a new protocol upgrade ‘Sentinel’, Dash breached the $100 million market cap milestone in January.

Come February, Dash released Sentinel and labeled it its “largest software upgrade ever.”

Sentinel is seen as a necessary protocol upgrade toward ‘Evolution’ a decentralized payments system that offers instant transactions and no fees for consumers and “near-free” merchant fees in an integrated marketplace.

At the start of March, Dash had risen from just above $11 per coin to nearly $40, over two months. Hong Kong-based exchange Bitfinex added Dash to its roster of cryptocurrencies. By the end of Q1 2017, Dash experienced a 10x increase in trading volumes, surging from USD $3 million to $30 million. On March 18, the cryptocurrency’s market cap soared to an all-time high $835 million, over 10x from $78 million on January 1.

At the time of publishing, Dash prices are up nearly 25% since Kraken enabled support for the cryptocurrency, rising from $60 per coin to nearly $75 at the time of publishing. Dash’s market cap currently stands at just under $550 million.