Dusk Network Development Update — February

A monthly development update series created to embrace the transparency and inclusivity that we strive for at Dusk Network.

Time flies! The shortest month of the year does not equate to the least amount of work done. On contrary, the month has been a bustling one. From two new developers joining our ever-growing ranks to the ever-improving consensus, we have a lot of information to share with our readers in this month’s edition of the Development Update.

Development

The entire team was excited to see our overhauled consensus protocol in action. Right on the cusp of February, our development had finished the build which also included the blind bid protocol integration and the preliminary benchmarks proved our initial optimism to be justified. More information on the consensus protocol improvements will be made public in the coming weeks along with the benchmarking data and the screenshots of our uber-cool testing UI.

The next step in the path to a fully-optimized, mainnet-ready consensus protocol is to test the effects of extreme network latencies on the efficiency of the protocol. The testing will be done by deploying hundreds of virtual nodes on 5 continents (using Amazon EC2) as well as involving artificial latency modelled after the measurements of the Bitcoin network.

Outside the realms of SBA★, the team has been occupied with benchmarking the various modules as well as fixing minor bugs and housekeeping the code. The expertise of Matteo Ferretti is enabling us to take strides in the direction of a functional zero-knowledge Virtual Machine, with the preliminary specifications inked and rudimentary code being built.

Research

After months of research and discussions, the team has settled on a preliminary Confidential Security Contract (XSC) standard, which will act as a building block for the security token launches on the platform in the future. The standard includes compulsory and optional fields, which are going to be natively supported by our Virtual Machine.

The team has also established a Dusk Enhancement Recommendation (DER) standard. DER is a framework for community improvement proposals and will enable the wider public to participate in research and development of the protocol, once the reference implementation is open-sourced.

Understanding the importance of extensive documentation, we have started work on Dusk Network Protocol Specification paper, which is going to be released in the coming months alongside the updated whitepaper and the SBA★ Technical Paper.

Community

After being on a receiving side of a plethora of requests for in-depth articles on the technology that Dusk Network employs, we finally decided to pull the trigger and launch our new Medium series — Explored, which is going to feature articles on the theoretical aspects of the technologies that combined together form the Dusk Network protocol.

On the marketing front, the team has been finalizing the update to our website, called Dusk Network 2.0, which is going to be launched shortly.

How to learn more about Dusk Network

The Dusk Network is a project coordinated by the Dusk Foundation. We are a decentralized ecosystem entirely focused on providing the perfect trade-off between privacy and transparency. Dusk protects privacy and fits regulations in payments, communications and asset transfers.

Website: https://www.dusk.network

FAQ: https://www.dusk.network/faq

Telegram: https://t.me/dusknetwork

Twitter: https://twitter.com/duskfoundation

Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/dusknetwork

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/duskfoundation/

GitHub: https://github.com/dusk-network