Dusk Network Development Update — March

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

We're back with another update! An extremely productive month here at the Dusk Foundation offices has concluded with spectacular results. From implementation of a new top-secret (for now!) hash function to a finalized preliminary cryptoeconomic model of the network, the reader is advised to strap in before reading the article.

Development

After thorough testing of the consensus protocol implementation since the launch of the devnet, the team has discovered a few imperfections in the implementation that were hindering the execution speed. What followed was a near-complete overhaul of the implementational architecture of the consensus module. We are happy to inform that we have managed to vastly improve the execution speeds and remove the main bottlenecks of the previous implementation. Ever since the last update was published, the team has been testing the node implementation on a network spanning 300 nodes on different continents, instead of simulating the connection delays on a local network, moving closer to the real-world deployment scenario. During our tests, we managed to discover as well as fix numerous bugs and we are certain that with a help of the community, more will be detected and solved before the scheduled mainnet launch (more details on the bug bounty programme will be announced after the publication of the reference implementation and the accompanying documentation).

The team has also began implementing a brand new Bulletproof-friendly hash function co-created by Dmitry Khovratovic, our Cryptography Lead. The aforementioned hash function achieves major improvement in the efficiency compared to the current Bulletproof-friendly hash functions such as MiMC and Pedersen. More information on the hash function will be communicated after the publication of the paper in the near future.

Research

Our team has been researching and building a brand new Bulletproof-friendly curve based on the Ristretto scalar field. While Ristretto curve offers a prime field abstraction over a near-prime field (co-factor 8 field in particular), the circuit representation of the curve is very expensive to compute proofs on and required a new curve specification for the implementation to be computationally viable. More information on the curve, called Doppio, and the accompanying documentation will be provided after the completion of the curve implementation. The use of the Doppio curve enables us to implement an efficient ring-signature scheme in Bulletproofs, which, according to our estimates, will cut down the transaction sizes by up to 30%.

The world of consensus protocols never stops spinning and the search for an ideal consensus framework continues. While we’ve been implementing an upgrade to the consensus protocol, informally dubbed SBA 2.0, the team has already been in search for more improvements, which came in form of a reduction in the number of consensus steps required to achieve probabilistically secure finality. The latest breakthrough is still in the research phase and will continue to be refined before being implemented and tested on our multi-continent testing suite.

While all of that was happening behind the scenes, the team has been actively working on the cryptoeconomic model of Dusk Network. The team has decided that the emission will span for at least 2 decades, with the DUSK minting frequency beginning to gradually decay after the first 10 million blocks (roughly 9.5 years with the currently set block times). During the same discussions, we have agreed that the testnet (more on it in the Community section) is not going to feature upper or lower bounds on the bid and stake sizes as we would like to publicly test the behavior of the network before deciding on the optimal concrete parameters.

Community

With the testnet launch approaching, the team will begin communicating the rollout schedule for the reference implementation in the coming days alongside with the publication of the code.

We have finally launched our new website which includes the redesigned brand image!

Dusk — Technology for Securities

Dusk streamlines the issuance of digital securities and automates trading compliance with the world’s first programmable and confidential securities.