Dash, a cryptocurrency that was once among the largest altcoins but heavily fell out of favor in recent years, blindsided crypto traders this month with a 195% price surge.
DASH started off 2025 at a price of roughly $39.7, but declined considerably in Q2 and then proceeded to languish in a relatively tight range between $18 and $26 from April to October.
The coin’s fortunes finally started to turn around in October, as the DASH price more than doubled during the month, hitting a local peak of $54.6. This momentum carried over into early November, as the second leg of the rally took DASH to a peak of $148, the coin’s highest level since late 2021.
However, the prices Dash reached in its glory days still appear to be out of reach. The coin’s historical peak came during the height of the 2017 crypto bull market, where DASH exploded to $1,726 before violently correcting downwards. At its current price of $106, DASH is changing hands 94% down from its all-time high.
Despite this, the coin’s recent rally has been very impressive. Let’s take a closer look at the key drivers behind Dash’s massive price increase.
The main reason for why Dash has recently made huge coins is most likely not even connected to Dash. The coin started rallying in response to a big price increase displayed by another cryptocurrency, Zcash.
As we can see in the 3-month price comparison below, Zcash began rallying hard towards the end of September. With a short delay, Dash started to echo this rally, and a similar pattern repeated itself at the end of October when a big surge in the ZEC price was followed by a DASH pump about a week later.
This phenomenon was not isolated to just Dash, as Decred and Horizen also showed a similar pattern, defying the bearish conditions in the broader cryptocurrency market to produce strong rallies.
Why did Dash (alongside Decred and Horizen) benefit from the Zcash rally while the rest of the cryptocurrency market slumped? The answer is actually quite simple.
Many traders interpreted the Zcash price increase as the start of “privacy season”, i.e. a period in the cryptocurrency market where privacy coins outperform the rest. Dash’s optional PrivateSend feature, which makes it possible to send DASH with a greater degree of privacy (through mixing) made it easy to slot Dash into the growing privacy narrative.
Dash (as well as Decred and Horizen) also have another key similarity with Zcash. All these cryptocurrencies are considered “dino coins”, which is a term used to refer to older cryptocurrency projects that are no longer considered trendy among crypto investors.
Regardless of whether one interpreted the Zcash rally as the result of a surge in demand for privacy or as the result of a dino coin resurgence, Dash fit perfectly into either narrative.
In our view, these two simple factors almost fully explain why Dash has seen such a large price increase recently. In a period where top crypto assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana saw substantial price declines and Zcash started producing a big rally seemingly out of the blue, traders were more than willing to hop onto whatever narrative could be used to explain ZEC’s performance.
Although the current Dash rally is most likely primarily driven by a response to the the Zcash rally, there are still other reasons to the bullish on the project.
Dash is preparing a major upgrade to its privacy system with the introduction of Confidential Transactions (CT). This marks a key evolution from the long-standing CoinJoin mechanism that Dash has used since 2014 to obscure transaction links between senders and recipients.
CT will hide transaction amounts and wallet balances, ensuring only the sender and recipient know the value exchanged. The blockchain will still remain auditable for transparency. This upgrade brings Dash in line with a growing industry trend toward confidentiality, as seen in projects like Solana, PayPal, and Circle.
Here’s how Dash will benefit from the introduction of Confidential Payments:
The Dash project is still very active from a technical development standpoint, and users can look forward to major future improvements. The two standout future improvements are the introduction of smart contracts capabilities (complementing the blockchain’s current data contracts feature), as well as integration with the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) interoperability protocol.
According to the official Dash roadmap, we can expect to see both of these major upgrades deployed on the Dash blockchain in 2026.
