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

Before we begin, we would like to wish our readers a Happy New Year and thank our community for their never-ending support! December has been a monumental month for Dusk Network, as we have begun the release of the Sandboxed Mainnet, as well as presented some of the novel technologies that are being developed in the background. For those who missed our updates, below you can find a brief summary on our progress in the past month.

Development

We have announced the commencement of the release of our Sandbox Mainnet. With this release we are able to provide commercial partners access to our platform in a controlled environment, where all the microservices forming Dusk Network’s node reference implementation are brought to life: Poseidon hash function, Phoenix and Zedger transaction models, Proof-of-Blind Bid and a novel Byzantine Agreement-based finality gadget forming Segregated Byzantine Agreement (SBA) consensus protocol, Smart Contract platform and Confidential Security Contract (XSC) standard.

“With the Sandbox Mainnet, partners get accustomed to our technology, and by gradually rolling out more features they can adapt to the new infrastructure and build the required libraries and knowledge.”

In addition, we announced the release of Kelvin. “Kelvin introduces a layer that separates Merkle tree data structures (DS) from the database (DB) backend. It hides all the complexity of having to deal with the overhead..[…] (cache invalidation, data mutability, interconnectedness with a single DB, etc), introduces optimizations for append-only operations, and makes it easy to swap between various types of DS and DBs at will.”

Research

We have presented our two novel transaction models: Phoenix and Zedger. The combined use of the two represents the transactional backbone of the full privacy-oriented stack of Dusk Network: from confidential transfers of DUSK coin, up to confidential exchange of fully regulated assets.

Phoenix is our UTXO-based transaction model enabling confidential spending of non-obfuscated outputs. Phoenix will replace our current RingCT transaction model within the Dusk Network protocol. The unique feature of Phoenix is the guarantee of transactional confidentiality even when spending public outputs such as block rewards or gas fee refunds.

Zedger is our hybrid transaction model which forms the basis for Dusk Network’s Confidential Security Contract (XSC) standard. Zedger complements Phoenix by providing UTXO’s with account-based capabilities that enable the functionality required to power the feature set of XSC.

Community

We have shared our best practices from the trade mission to Singapore. We concluded that value creation should always be the center of focus as it leads to the adoption of new technologies. Therefore, we adopted the ‘eat your own dog food’ strategy, becoming an integrator of Dusk Network ourselves and working closely with partners to lead the value creation process.

We have published Part III of the Economic Model series, where we discussed the challenges and solutions specific to the Dusk Network protocol requirements. In this part we discuss the complexity of state transitions for protocols including zero-knowledge proofs. “Within Dusk Network the computational complexity is drastically decreased by 1) imposing an artificial limit on the number of sub-operations (i.e. computation cycles) a transaction can require. 2) proof verification through PLONK, as its verification times are constant and 3) limiting the data stored in the Merkle-Patricia tree to the contract data (i.e. limiting the number of I/O operations).”

A Dusk Network CLI Wallet guide has also been released. “To simplify access to our staging environment, we introduced easy-to-use buttons that help in wallet interactions. This should lower the barrier for early testers, as you can test easily without having all sorts of coding experience.” After a period of community testing our wallet, we update the wallet with the Dusk design system.

The Dusk design system is an online communication tool that ensures alignment between user experience, graphic design, and other business elements that have a stake in company branding. Eventually, all applications and user interfacing components on the Dusk Network follow this design system for a consistent look and feel.

Dusk — Technology for Securities

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