Despite the massive power blackouts plaguing Venezuela, Dash’s SMS wallet Dash Text was reportedly operating smoothly.
Dash Text tweeted via their official handle @dash_text
Our platform is working perfectly despite the massive blackout in Venezuela. Use #DashText and pay with #Dash! 🚀
— Dash Text (@dash_text) March 8, 2019
Since last Thursday, i.e. 7th of March 2019, the country has been witness to a massive nationwide blackout that has plunged even critical infrastructure like hospitals into darkness. The current outage is claimed as the worst in decades and has resulted in a humanitarian crisis including looting, compounding the economic hardships and turmoil affecting the country. The power crisis has crippled the internet service and lack of internet access has made payment services, including cryptocurrency, ineffective.
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Dash Text, however, has been able to provide services despite the blackout, allowing Venezuelans to continue to send and receive money, including in and out of the country. The team has also recorded a video of using the service successfully during the power crisis.
Dash Text is a solution for sending Dash with no internet. Through this platform, a user can send, receive and check the available balance of their wallet by just sending a text message to the right phone number. Presently, once a user downloads Dash Wallet and creates an account, they can receive and send funds to anyone else anywhere in the world instantly. SMS text-based wallets further expand this functionality to the rest of the world with access to mobile phone networks but no internet.
One twitterati noted that the
“Banking systems to top up mobile phones in Venezuela are not working due to the outage. However, people have been able to top up their friend’s and family’s phones using … dash_text to maintain communication with their loved ones.”
Case in Venezuela establishes the cryptocurrency community’s claim that digital assets can be used beyond the developing world as a reliable means of transferring value, more than traditional payment networks and banking services. Centralized payment systems are held hostage by such risks apart from having a regulatory barrier.
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Dash has been actively working to improve their user experiences. A paper published by ASU Blockchain Lab verifies the viability of scaling the Dash network to mass levels on-chain primarily through increasing the block size. A recent update allows the functionality for instantly-confirmed transactions by default. They have also planned to implement to protect their users against 51% attacks.
