The project was initially released under the name XCoin (linking the identifier XCO to the monetary amounts denominated in the coin) on 18 January 2014
In the first 2 days after its launch, 1.9 million coins were mined, an amount that as of March 2017 would represent approximately a quarter of the total issued
Its creator and lead developer Evan Duffield attributed the event to a code bug that unexpectedly altered the difficulty, which affected the values used to calculate the subsidy
Once the problem was resolved, Evan offered to relaunch the currency, removing the coins generated by instamine, but the community rejected the offer. Following this, he suggested an airdrop to expand the existing supply of the cryptocurrency, a proposal that was also rejected. Subsequently, the issue of the initial distribution was dropped and the project continued.
On 28 February of the same year its name was changed to Darkcoin.
On 25 March 2015, the coin was renamed Dash for the third time, in reference to a play on words (Digital Cash), which in English means "Digital Cash"
