2019 | An Overview

What an exciting year it has been. We kick-started the year with our official End of Sale announcement, by which we secured a multi-year runway to build and improve the Dusk Network. Not a year later, our novel second-by-second vesting set-up has been fully concluded, and Dusk tokens are tradeable on notable exchanges like Binance, Bitfinex, and Bittrex Global.

We have not only developed the Dusk Network modules from Devnet to Testnet Shin to the release of Sandbox Mainnet and other modules in our staging environment, but also advocated a trust-less permission-less system on several blockchain events and trade missions, and acted as a bridge between zero-knowledge academics and our community by means of explanatory articles.

Most notable milestones of 2019.

2020 | Outlook

While development is characterized by a relentless pursuit of the right balance between different and sometimes conflicting goals (feature richness, performance, UX, etc), there is but one thing we do not compromise on: network security. Other than that, the efforts of the development team are driven toward

enabling commercial partners to start using the platform;

providing entry points to the network for the community;

promoting our innovations to create a bit of resonance in our target markets, with the aim to attract even more developers and partners.

We can’t take the risk of an all-or-nothing deployment of an immutable ledger, which is the reason why we have been stressing the incremental, expansive and gradual rollout of upgrades in our journey toward a secure and public mainnet.

We continue our development process in 2020

At Dusk Network, we follow quite a strict agile development process and release cycle. We strive for building the whole network incrementally, with features built in priority order. Component delivery is bound to happen in a controlled manner, to allow for the most secure way forward. Community facing components will be initially siloed away from the sandbox. They will nonetheless be operative. After a period of staging, the barriers of these siloes will fall.

Rather than following the same monolithic approach of the vast majority of other networks, we opted for a commutable architecture, where the different parts act as independent modules communicating with each other through a well-defined interface. This way, instead of a vertical technology stack, we strive for a horizontal network, in which almost every component can be swapped, upgraded, tested, staged and deployed separately from the others. There are several reasons why we opted for this configuration in the first place:

1) Minimize risks of integration | Dusk architecture is consistent with the so called microservices architecture, which is more suitable to tame the higher risk associated with rolling out new technologies that have never been released before (SBA, Private Proof-of-Stake, Phoenix, Zedger, Kelvin, PLONK, zero-knowledge Smart Contracts, and more).

2) Minimize risks of innovation | Dusk has been developed from the ground up. Unlike many other crypto projects, Dusk Network is not a shallow smart contract deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. Set to tackle the challenge of developing something truly unprecedented (a compliant, trustless and privacy-oriented network to handle regulated financial assets with no middleman), we had to develop most of our network tools pretty much from scratch. This means that we cannot avail of thorough operation history in a production environment. Hence, we plan ahead for risk mitigation and incorporate an architecture capable of isolating and upgrading/fixing faulty components without impacting the entire network.

3) Minimize risks of immutability | one point that we cannot repeat enough is that Dusk Network is not forkable. We cannot fork the network in case of problems (like in the case of “The DAO” hack). We have a true immutable ledger, which is the main reason for staging in various controlled environments.

4) Maximize Modularity | The Dusk development department consists of multidisciplinary teams working on components, each requiring different expertise. PLONK for instance, as a zero-knowledge proof system, requires specialized expertise in cryptography. Kadcast on the other hand, as a new P2P protocol for minimizing bandwidth, requires experience with network communications. It is just natural that these components find their way to production according to different paths and independently from each other.

5) Maximize Scalability | Because components are separated from each other and run within independent processes, they can be monitored and scaled independently. Bottlenecks are identified quickly and the overall architecture is more resilient.

Dusk Network | 2020 Goals

With the release of our Sandbox Mainnet we enable our partners to start using the platform. It is our immediate goal to let commercial partners and regulators acquire confidence on Dusk Network and show them how our permissionless ledger is reliable, and even superior to the alternatives for powering non-negligible movement of assets.

As discussed in the introduction, we are creating an environment, as close as possible to its final, permissionless and decentralized form, where assets can already be officially deployed. Simultaneously, we aim to push out all those user-facing applications that compose a functional network.

Next steps include the token swap, and opening up the sandbox to the public. Finally, the launch of the trading venue completes the system and adds a secondary market for issued securities.

Dusk is about steady growth, sustainable business and real fundamentals. Our partners and stakeholders dwell within the context of traditional finance. They are unfazed by empty metrics and hype cycles, value technological stability and value propositions above all.

And so does the Dusk Network team.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank you all for your engagement and continuous support over the past year, and wish you all a beautiful and wonderful New Year!