Building the Dusk ecosystem & bringing technology to market
At Dusk Network we make sure that our ever-growing team is aligned, pointed in the right direction and enabled to make good decisions autonomously. To achieve this, we align with each other in quarterly meetings to create the overarching strategy and business and technology goals for the upcoming months. A good moment for reflection and readjustment. This takes the shape of a strategic memo.
Jelle Pol, Project & Business Lead: “I’d like to personally address the community expectations regarding the timelines of the large partnership announcement.
In a recent AMA, I shared my expectation of being able to publicly announce our largest partnerships by late July / early August. The timeline provided by me in this AMA has proven too optimistic to overcome all the due diligence & research processes, by that date. Dusk operates in a highly regulated space, where we work with traditional partners that need to tick a lot of boxes before they can come to public disclosure.
I understand, and am humbled by, the anticipation shown by our growing community, and while I am hesitant to share new timelines, I can say we are close to our goal.
To provide some context to our upcoming funnel of partnership announcements I have decided to trim down our latest strategic memo and reveal some extent of the work we are doing on a higher level.”
Where are we today?
To keep it as short as possible;
- Closed an ~$8M Seed Round in Nov ’18 at $0.04 per token. Started trading in July.
- Released Testnet in July, and recently released an updated version.
- Built out the team and advisory board. Entire Dusk team at ~20 FTE.
- Are delivering an asset pipeline and platform to maximize traction upon mainnet go live.
Dusk Network is a protocol, which means that our adoption scales via the amount of applications built on top of Dusk Network, more specifically the number of issuers using the XSC standard to issue a security token. To develop a standard and have it adopted you automatically gain a B2B focus, where adoption can be accelerated by onboarding partner channels that bring recurring usage to the standard. Good examples in our cases are; large legal studios or consultancy firms that guide clients through the STO process, primary market platforms that specialize in fundraising, and regulated stock exchanges that want to adopt compliant blockchain solutions.
These ecosystem players all exhibit the following characteristics;
- They have a pipeline of STOs.
- They perform recurring issuance.
- They are not tech providers.
Dusk serves these players perfectly, and a business development focus geared towards them helps to kickstart Dusk as the #1 security token infrastructure. However, there is a second, more potent approach, which is to do it yourself first.
Leading by example
Looking into the past we have seen many technology firms succeed because they — themselves — brought to market a product that uses their own technology. This is exactly what we are doing with Dusk. By not only focusing on developing a strong ecosystem of XSC users, but also by becoming one of the first to integrate our own technology, we get hands on experience with Dusk, and kick-start traction.
Together with our partners, we are creating the ‘Dusk Security Token Exchange’ (placeholder name), which will offer both a primary market platform that promising companies can use to raise funds, as well as a secondary market — think: order book — for 24/7 trading of digital securities. The platform is the perfect way to prepare and already operate a large mix of assets whilst Mainnet is being finalized.
Once live, the platform will increasingly integrate functionality from the Dusk Mainnet. By leading the way and becoming our own integrator we can showcase directly what Dusk’s technological benefits are for stock exchanges, CSDs, issuing entities, legal studios, consultancy firms, as well as all the people interacting with these institutions or the investment opportunities they provide.
Recap
Dusk dis-intermediates the creation and transfer of securities, and through its decentralized and compliant nature serves as a global securities ledger. The business team is;
- Building and getting ready to operate a security token exchange that will use Dusk Network.
- On-boarding a mix of institutional partner channels and SMEs to bring the first assets to market, and later to Mainnet.
- Leading a regulatory dialogue to further the acceptance of blockchain technology in the highly regulated financial sector.
We are very excited to start revealing the parties involved in the progress we have been making, and understand the anticipation felt by many of our supporters. The team is diligently bringing home the last green lights required for the multi-month news campaign to kick off. The Dusk ecosystem is arriving much sooner than many anticipated, and it is great that you are part of it!
Dusk — Technology for Securities
Dusk Network is an open-source and privacy-oriented blockchain based on years of academic research. You can use Dusk Network to create smart contracts that control digital assets and securities.