A monthly development update series created to embrace the transparency and inclusivity that we strive for at Dusk Network
Dusk Network is developing the privacy blockchain for financial applications. A blockchain-based ecosystem of programmable digital assets that meet industry compliance standards. Companies use Dusk Network to secure capital, trade assets, and access a full spectrum of financial services.
Key takeaways:
- Cryptography breakthrough published: Reinforced Concrete research paper.
- Dusk Network’s Consensus Mechanism is put to the test.
- Work on UI/UX consistency for Dusk Network apps continues.
Cryptography
Reinforced Concrete
After much-deserved ado, the development of the new breakthrough hash function, Reinforced Concrete, has been finished. The function allows us to inject unseen levels of performance and security into our Zero-Knowledge proofs.
The new hash function has been worked on since last year, relying on well-tested security assumptions and a number of established cryptanalytic methods. In addition, Reinforced Concrete uses much faster components (such as table lookups) instead of modular arithmetics.
In real terms, the integration of this new hash function will enable Dusk Network to drastically decrease the proving times for zero-knowledge proofs. This development allows Dusk Network to pioneer efficient and generic verifiable computation.
Development
E2E Release Candidate library releases - RUSK & Reinforced Concrete
New RC library releases continue to come out in the lead-up to our Incentivized Testnet. Coinciding with the completion of the Reinforced Concrete hash function, we released the library for Reinforced Concrete and its repository to the public. We’re very excited to report that Dusk Network’s implementation of Reinforced Concrete Bricks marks the world's first Reinforced Concrete implementation integrated into a proof system.
But this wasn’t the only library release. Earlier that month saw the release of RUSK, Dusk Network’s Smart Contract Platform. RUSK is vital to enabling users to deploy smart contracts, power new decentralized applications (dApps), and set all kinds of parameters for compliance and control. This release, when combined with the prior release of the Rusk Virtual Machine, puts all the components for the zero-knowledge-friendly Virtual Machine into place.
You can read more on our library releases in their respective articles or find the complete Dusk Network Release Candidate Schedule here.
Monitoring & Improving Consensus
The consensus mechanism forms the backbone of our protocol. It should be no surprise that said building block is under constant scrutiny. The team is continuously monitoring consensus with a focus on stability, security, and performance, implementing minor improvements along the way. After a sufficient period of testing, we complicate the setup (e.g. an increase in Provisioners and/or more transactions per second, etc.) and retest.
The testing has already helped us discover a bug in the block finalization logic, which in some rare cases could cause a fork to happen. The bug has already been fixed and the vulnerability is no longer possible in our SBA Consensus Algorithm.
UI Kit and UX
Consistency is vital to the user experience. However, Dusk Network apps are isolated, portable, and serverless. Thus, to promote a consistent user experience across these apps, our apps are being built from the same component library (Dusk UI Kit) and on the same boilerplate code. Significant time was spent in August ensuring this consistency. For instance, one of the main points of contact with users will be our wallet web app; this month saw the integration of more complicated UI components into said app. To make future integration and alterations even easier moving forward, work is ongoing to refine the developer experience even further: improved tools and documentation for the UI Kit, Wallet, and other apps are now available to the development team.
This approach to the UI/UX allows us to avoid having a monolithic application in the Dusk Network stack, giving us the freedom to move cloud service providers and spin up back-up solutions should we have issues in the future.
Research
This month has seen a whole lot of writing in the research department as they started with the documentation for the VM. Although not the sexiest activity, good documentation is of the utmost importance if you’d like to involve others in your technology stack, whether they are developers, stakers, or network users of any other sort.
Besides documentation, the team continued crunching their minds on the future possibility of implementing sharding. Heterogeneous sharding is worked on to improve the functionality of the protocol, and will drastically improve the throughput of the protocol.
Eagle Eye View - Roadmap
For a more thorough view of all the Dusk Network development components, please visit the Eagle Eye Roadmap.
Outlook
Next month we’ll continue to put the stability of our consensus to the test, particularly with a target milestone of 100.000 consensus rounds driven by 64 Provisioners on our DevNet.
With stable consensus, we’ll initiate the integration of RUSK into the Dusk-Blockchain, a hefty and important step towards the public release of our Nodes. In the meantime, the research department will continue its efforts on documentation and sharding.
Community
Dusk Network has one of the most passionate communities in crypto. That’s why we wanted to do something for those who want to rep the project in style. Our newly launched webshop is host to uniquely designed, limited edition, and individually numbered hoodies. Only 100 copies of this custom hoodie will be publicly available for purchase, so get yours now!
Members of the Dusk Team attended the Ethereum Community Conference this past month. The event spanned July 20th to July 22nd; three days of presentations, networking, and sharing knowledge to bolster the Ethereum ecosystem. Dozens of speakers took the stage to present, touching upon a variety of industry topics and technologies; far too many to cover comprehensively. This is why we’ve asked the team to share their thoughts on the event, which you can find here.
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About Dusk Network
Dusk Network is the privacy blockchain for financial applications. A new standard for compliance, control, and collaboration. Our mission is to enable any size enterprise to collaborate at scale, meet compliance requirements and ensure that personal and transaction data remains confidential.