We recently released our updated roadmap that charts the way to mainnet. 

We were thrilled to host an AMA in our Discord where CEO and co-founder Emanuele Francioni and Core Contributor and Developer Hein Dauven were on hand to provide more information about the roadmap and the key deliverables.

They also answered questions from the community, and there may have even been some alpha dropped!

You can listen to the replay below.

Key Points:

November Deliverables: Citadel and Piecrust

Emanuele Francioni: Citadel is a tool conducive to self-sovereign identity. From a KYC angle, there is a self-sovereign, privacy-preserving KYC solution, which is very important, especially in regulated applications, for digital identity, which is different from KYC. Digital identity pertains to a certain asset linked to someone's identity, verifying who you claim to be based on the proof you provide. Citadel is also a permissionless restriction system.

Overall, Piecrust is a significant improvement over the old VM. It solves many different problems and is highly optimized to work with our consensus. Specifically, our consensus reaches finality after various votes on different blocks. When a new block is voted on, if a block from a smaller iteration has higher priority, we need to quickly switch to that state. Piecrust efficiently avoids re-executing transactions, achieving a substantial performance improvement, which is a real achievement for us.

December Deliverables: Web Wallet and Economic Protocol

Emanuele: With the web wallet, we will be among the first privacy-preserving projects to offer a web wallet that integrates various zero-knowledge proofs. These proofs can be quite bulky due to pre-compiled data known as approver keys, often hundreds of megabytes. Fortunately, we've developed descriptors for these keys, allowing us to create transactions directly in the browser or using a dedicated prover, which can be provided by the community or Dusk.

The web wallet will integrate well with the modularization capability of WebAssembly, a core technology for Dusk. WebAssembly bytecodes can function as smart contracts and, being native to browsers, enable seamless execution, making Dusk smart contracts and their user interfaces a perfect match.

Hein Dauven: The web wallet is the gateway to Dusk, and it's essential for us to provide this tooling. It offers an opportunity to innovate beyond what MetaMask offers in terms of usability, improving the user experience significantly.

Emanuele: The Economic Protocol in Dusk is groundbreaking, not only for keeping the community incentivized but also for convincing traditional businesses to migrate to decentralized infrastructure. In Web2 applications, users pay for services, and services pay for infrastructure, often on platforms like AWS or Digital Ocean. In Web3, it's challenging to enable users or services to pay their own suppliers transparently. The Economic Protocol aims to solve this problem by allowing smart contracts to pay for their own gas and charge users for services, replicating Web2 monetization capabilities.

Hein: Another intriguing implication of the Economic Protocol is the possibility of users paying with stablecoins like digital Euro or digital Dollar for services while the smart contracts still pay in DUSK for gas, preserving the utility of DUSK.

ERC20 Bridge

Hein: The ERC20 bridge is the migration of Dusk from ERC20 on Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain to a native chain. This one-way bridge, for security reasons, allows users to migrate their ERC20 DUSK to the native DUSK chain. The bridge will remain in service for as long as needed, giving users ample time to make the transition.

What Can We Expect with Mainnet?

Emanuele: Mainnet marks the beginning of most of our plans, although not all of them. By launching mainnet, we ensure the protocol is secure, performant, and ready for various upgrades that will follow. One of the challenges for a censorship-resistant ledger like Dusk is performing upgrades seamlessly.

We've thought extensively about this and aim to achieve the capability of upgrading without resorting to forking or other mechanisms. Mainnet will prepare for smart contracts, especially confidential smart contracts, and regulated asset issuance. It positions Dusk as a contender for various services such as acting as a CSD or clearinghouse for regulated transactions.

Want more? Check out the full recording.