5 Things to Know About Dusk

As we get ready for ITN, and move closer and closer to mainnet, let’s have a refresher on what Dusk is, in 5 key points. Dusk is built on the three core pillars of privacy, compliance, and bringing real-world assets to everyone’s wallet. 

But let’s go a bit deeper, and have a look at the technology, features, and novelties that Dusk brings.

Dusk is a Layer One that prioritizes both privacy and compliance

Dusk is a Layer One blockchain that uses advanced zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology to provide privacy on-chain while also complying with necessary regulations, including KYC/AML. 

Transactions on Dusk are private, but auditible meaning that no one can see your transactions on-chain or look inside your wallet, but relevant authorities can still perform audits if necessary and we have the tools to perform private KYC procedures as needed (more on that later).

This means that Dusk is both private and compliant. We believe that privacy is a human right and also a necessity for meaningful, real-world adoption. Blockchain as it stands offers anonymity, so long as no one has your wallet address you can transact without anyone knowing it’s you, not to mention the fact that so much of crypto is anonymous online too. This works so long as no one can link you to your wallet address.

But when introduced to the “real world” of regulated assets, real world payments, and membership subscriptions, it becomes clear that actual privacy, not just presumed anonymity, is required. 

So, Dusk is both private and compliant.

You can have a look at the Dusk testnet explorer to see how transactions are recorded, and see that they don’t include amounts or addresses.

Dusk is custom-built

Dusk is built from scratch, not only as a blockchain, but also in terms of the supporting infrastructure like wallets and tooling. At Dusk we are solving two sets of problems; the problems finance faces and the problems blockchain faces. Finance has issues like fragmented liquidity and a lack of interoperability both across and within institutions, while blockchain suffers from a poor UX and a lack of real world use cases.

Dusk solves both.

We have a groundbreaking, custom-built virtual machine that is privacy-friendly, allows for one block sync up to the network, and does not suffer from state bloat. 

We have a web wallet that can handle ZKP computations in-browser, and allows for infinite customization from the branding to functionality, meaning anyone can brand the wallet or add capabilities to it to suit their business needs.

We also have revolutionary nodes that support privacy within a shared state, which no other blockchain (as far as we know) has been able to do, allowing for the private spending on public coins. Not to mention the Succinct Attestation consensus, first conceived by co-founder Emanuele Francioni and further developed by the team, which allows for the infinite scalability of verifiers.  

See this link for more on the web wallet and node.

Finally, our cryptography research team has been leading the way in their field, from publishing papers to developing Citadel, a ZKP-friendly licensing tool, which is particularly useful for KYC, and allows users to access goods and services without having to reveal their private data. 

These are just some of the groundbreaking innovations the team has created. 

Dusk has strong partnerships 

Dusk is a shareholder in NPEX, a stock exchange in The Netherlands, as well as having strong relationships with other similar companies in Europe and beyond. 

The team at Dusk are focused on working with financial institutions to not only tokenize their assets but to natively issue assets on-chain. This is a whole new paradigm for finance, and would allow the financial industry to evolve dramatically, increase access to liquidity and capital, and dramatically reduce inefficiencies, taking settlement and reconciliation from days to seconds, as an example. 

We’ve begun to see institutional interest in blockchain with the BTC ETF and people like Larry Fink championing blockchain. Dusk has the vision, the tech, and the relationships to make this possible. 

Dusk is public and permissionless

While this might be what the team is working on, Dusk is a permissionless blockchain meaning anyone can build on us. From other RWA projects who want to take advantage of our tech and tooling, to privacy maxis who want to launch projects using privacy-friendly smart contracts, to anyone who wants to run a node to secure the network.

There is also an argument made against public blockchains, suggesting that institutions will want private blockchains. In our experience this is not the case. While some institutions may have private blockchains, private blockchains miss the unifying liquidity and data layer of a public one. By offering privacy within a shared state, Dusk achieves what no one else has by giving institutions the privacy they need and giving them access to a public blockchain, unified liquidity, and an uncensorable network.

Dusk is coming soon!

Mainnet is scheduled for March/April, and we’ve been making amazing progress on our roadmap, ticking off 6/6 milestones so far. 

Staking of DUSK ERC20 is currently live, and our incentivized testnet, ITN, where you can run nodes, is starting on 15th February. 

We will share more guides on how to set up your node ASAP, and in the meantime you can join our Discord and Telegram.