Dusk Network Development Update — November

The Road to Mainnet V1 edition

In this update we provide an extensive Mainnet and Development update. As some of our regular readers will notice, this is a longer development update post than usual — bear with us!

Mainnet update

Yes! We are close to a Q4 2019 launch of the Dusk Network Mainnet! And while some of you know that we’ve been in Testnet V2 for quite some time now, we have waited with the release of the official update on this until the V2 results could be collected. Our main challenge was to ensure that the SBA consensus would tie in nicely with Dusk’s revolutionary privacy preserving transactional model. This is needed in order to propel the first of many XSC security token ecosystems we are going to launch to production.

Whenever such novelties are brought together, one must pay careful attention that the security remains intact, no new attack vectors are being created, and performance will remain acceptable. This was the declared aim for Testnet V2, making it arguably among the most important milestones of our roadmap. After carefully assessing months’ worth of execution, we can proudly confirm that our expectations have been met and even exceeded. Testnet V2 is running in a very stable fashion and even significantly improves on our former benchmarks.

User interfacing components

The time has come to confirm the consensus stable, and to turn our attention to the last, equally important, modules of our stack: the user interfacing components. Testnet remaining versions (V3 and V4) are sharply focused on refining and perfecting the user journey. Our goal is to appeal to a larger slice of our community, opening up the testing grounds to as many of you as possible, and achieve the perfect balance between decentralization, privacy and usability.

Those of you following our Github probably already noticed the unceasing stream of commits on Dusk’s wallet. Under the hood similar efforts have been driven on additional repositories that have so far been kept private, such as Dusk’s block explorer, the installers for the block generator and node, and a slick, standardized UI library which feeds the various interfaces used by the XSC stakeholders (asset issuers, auditors, traders, regulators, etc). It must be said that these efforts have been ongoing for quite a while and therefore the testing phase of V3 and V4 will be nowhere near as intensive or lengthy as V2.

Mainnet V1

Approaching the launch, a set of smart contracts representing partly issuance of assets, partly operation execution will be deployed on a sandboxed version of our mainnet, in accordance with what is already perceived as a good practice by Dutch regulators. Operating in what is perceived as a safe environment, albeit of production quality, has been pivotal in driving the adoption of a permissionless blockchain in the traditional financial world, where, before Dusk, only permissioned networks have been allowed to operate.

The sandbox is a great way forward to achieve integration with the initial adopting partners of Dusk Network, to introduce community participation in the form of permissionless block generation (and the final step before full network decentralization), and to rely on a controlled multi-stage period of opening up all of the features to the community. Think partner onboarding, release of block explorer & wallet, provide support with node setups, and token swap.

The road ahead

The road to Dusk Network launch is thus clearly paved. We have been working methodically towards a Q4 Mainnet V1 release stream in order to release a number of features not yet seen before in the cryptocurrency space, together with an entire backlog of incremental upgrades that will be rolled out gradually and expand the network’s performance and use cases. On the business side of the equation, the mainnet release now signifies the execution of the next phase of our commercial partnerships.