A currency is reborn [ by Evan Duffield ]

Darkcoin’s vision has always been to create a trust-less, decentralized, private and fast payment platform for the benefit of the majority. This is our ethos and our most important goal, recently it became apparent that our branding was getting in the way of reaching the people we were trying to help, that is when I knew that in order to accomplish our vision we would need to change our name. Our ideals remain intact and we will continue to pursue them under any branding we have, now and in the future.

Months ago the community organically came up with the name “Dash” as a possible rebranding idea of Darkcoin, I took notice of this and the good deal of support it had in the forums. This lead to us researching the Dash brand for a few months. In the process of doing some investigation, we found that there was another company in the financial space that was filing a trademark. This resulted in me buying another coin “Dashcoin” and challenging their trademark application.

There is some misunderstanding in the community about why there was a quick move to announce this without a previous debate on the forums, as I originally intended. It was simply the result of a mistake on github, where I posted a comment to the Darkcoin github account with the Dashcoin github account login. I felt it was best to show the community where I was with the research, rather than let rampant speculation move through the community about why we were in control of the Dashcoin project. Acquiring Dashcoin is no different than getting a previously existing domain name, the acquired project itself will not continue only the DRK project will move forward under a new name. I had to make some really quick decisions and I apologize for the confusion that resulted from my mistakes.

That’s all in the past now and after careful consideration, reading all the posts from everyone for the last few days and weighing every argument, I believe it is best if we make it official that we’re going with DASH. At this point our priority is to have closure so we can move on, the uncertainty hurts the community and markets, more than any renaming options and prevents us from moving forward with development.

Communication has been an issue for us, as Darkcoin has quickly grown over the last 14 months. We have grown so fast that I couldn’t keep everyone in the loop at all times. We’re addressing this by moving all development coordination to Slack, which has already had a great positive impact on the project. Part of managing something that grows this quickly is addressing weak areas that can be improved, we believe moving to a platform that the whole development team can openly communicate on is key to that goal.

I do appreciate the support of the community on this and I apologize if there was poor communication on my part, this has been an extremely difficult subject to navigate and I have tried to do my best. I know mistakes have been done, this has been a very difficult time for me. But we have new tools in place, to prevent any future communication mistakes like this.

DASH is just a name we still need to build our vision onto it and we need everyone’s support to push the project forward.

Over the next weeks we will be planning the name change and Logo Design work with the participation of the whole community, details regarding this will be revealed soon.