Dusk is unique because our Dusk blockchain basically focuses on providing the right confidentiality in the 3 different scenario that render the platform a true network:

1 - Unidirectional atomic transfer of value (basically, payments)
2 - Bidirectional atomic exchange of value (transfer of asset ownership - securities fall in this category)
3 - Time unbound exchange of value (transmission of data stream - such as audiovisual conferencing, content streaming, etc)

Could you maybe rephrase your question, I am not sure what you mean 

More than TPS, which is a meaningless measure when in presence of an adaptive block size, it makes more sense to speak about throughput. Early experimentation shows that we can achieve extreme throughput by propagating block and block hashes separately (and worry about consistency later, as reconciliation would be indeed a separate matter). In this case it would not be excluded a throughput roughly 10^2 that of Bitcoin.

This expectation is dependent on a lot of configuration throttling, as it would be connected to a few implementation choices. The most important of which are probably the ring signature size and the flavour of proof range used (bulletproof being my first candidate)

Nicolas Cimon joins Dusk Network as Strategic Advisor

We are delighted to announce that Nicolas Cimon, Managing Director of Cross Border Consulting, and former Senior Associate in Securities, is joining the Dusk Foundation as a Strategic Advisor for the Dusk Network.



Nicolas Cimon has 20 years of experience in the legal and consulting business working in Canada and Europe and serving clients in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Nicolas worked as a securities lawyer for Ogilvy Renault (now Norton Rose Fulbright) in Canada and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in France. He was involved in major initial public offerings of securities, issuance of debt and hybrid securities and takeovers of publicly listed corporations in Canada, US and Europe. In particular, Nicolas was involved in the IPO of the pan-European exchange Euronext. As a consultant, Nicolas is executing strategic recruitments for international law firms, investment banks and leading blockchain technology companies.

Nicolas graduated in law at Laval University in Quebec, Canada and completed an MBA at Laval University and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina. He is fluent in English, French and Spanish.

The Dusk Foundation will benefit strongly from his expertise as a legal counsel in the securities industry to navigate through the different legal systems and setting up the standard for a decentralized privacy network and Security Token Offerings.

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.

Please consider joining us at the following media:

• Website
• FAQ
• Telegram
• Twitter
• Reddit
• LinkedIn
• GitHub

Ethereum offers no ledger privacy apart from zk-SNARKS (which is reliant on a trusted setup which needs to run at any configuration change). This basically forces issuers to avail of off-chain solutions which is very expensive and defeats the purpose of 1) decentralization 2) common task automation 3) streamline legal process 4) performances (as trading restriction needs to be arbitrated all the time through third party smart contracts, rather than being embedded at protocol level). So, to be able to meet the requirements of STOs, Ethereum needs third party platforms (like Polymath, Harbor, etc etc) which are basically application-level smart contracts, which resort mostly to off-chain processing, with no exception.

This is also because these platforms have absolutely no say at the protocol level and must adapt to what it is available to them. In that respect, they have a very limited control on the confidentiality level (and in fact they resort almost always to suboptimal off-chain solutions - see for example Harbor, Polymath or even Securitize) and are bound to biblical release time for anything that revolves around NFRs (Non Functional Requirements, such as, for instance, scalability, security, resource management, network configurations, SLAs, etc etc) since Ethereum must scale GLOBALLY all the propositions (meaning smart contracts or set of smart contracts).

Dusk is NOT a general purpose smart contract platform.
It is extremely focused on the use cases it intends to unlock and as a result it can be very specific in the strategies it adopts to scale and satisfy the NFRs of the use cases at hand.

It basically focuses on providing the right confidentiality in the 3 different scenario that render the platform a true network:
1 - Unidirectional atomic transfer of value (basically, payments)
2 - Bidirectional atomic exchange of value (transfer of asset ownership - securities fall in this category)
3 - Time unbound exchange of value (transmission of data stream - such as audiovisual conferencing, content streaming, etc)

We are gonna rollout sequentially the three layers of the network, which will each unlock one of these 3 parts
However we believe that 2 is the most critical as it taps into a market which potential is in the Trillions of Euros
Since we are heavily partial for this particular use case, it is very logical that we adjust the protocol to satisfy all the regulations (and not, like in the cases above, adjust the application layer to workaround the protocol limitations)

To give you an example of what we can do on Dusk which would be unthinkable in Ethereum please consider the following feature.

Dusk decouples the (centralized) KYC/AML vendor process from the (decentralized) security issuance and transaction arbitration with the aid of time-locked accumulators. Cryptographic accumulators are ideal for implementing zero-knowledge white/black listing accreditation of (un-)compliant investors and automated accreditation. Also, expiry mechanism can be added for forcing rechecks. It roughly works in the following way: as soon as the KYC/AML process completes, the transactor identifier (basically his registered wallet address, but it can also be something else, i.e. biometric data, etc) is committed to the accumulator, which remains opaque and discloses nothing of its set. A witness (called compliance witness) is thus generated and returned to the applicant. Such witness is the proof of set inclusion. From that point on, all transactions related to that particular asset class (token) must include the compliance witness. Since the info is directly added as payload of our own (improved) version of bulletproof transactions, the need for open data inspection on transaction clearance is therefore removed. The accumulator is stored on-chain (as it basically is just a number) and recheck forcing can happen through a removal operation which activation can be coded trustlessly and can be as simple as a periodic expiry or by encoding more sophisticated rules through a (zk-)smart contract.
Dusk will host the accumulators directly ON CHAIN, since it is line with our strategy to handle scenario nr. 2 of the above list

Ethereum would never do such a thing considering that it would not make sense to store a data structure on chain that is specific for a tiny fraction of its applications (i.e. Polymath and Harbor) and would be completely useless for, say, propositions such as Omisego, Kyber, Basic Attention Token, Bancor, Status, Civic, Aragon, etc etc.

This means that the applications would have to battle against the Ethereum protocol (i.e. move an eventual accumulator off-chain to the detriment of decentralization).

This would have nefarious consequences for scalability as well, considering that these proposition must resort to  continuously calling smart contracts in order to arbitrate the transaction operations (to the detriment of both performance and privacy), while Dusk is in the liberty of enriching the transaction directly with zero knowledge data from the transactors (the compliance witness), leaving absolute liberty over which vendor the issuer wants to rely upon and keeping the centralized compliance-related operations (like for instance KYC/AML) separated from the transaction stream.

This is a misconception. In democratic societies, privacy is very well accepted and even enforced at legislative levels by policy makers. An example is the GDPR. Another is the SEC enforcing secrecy to trading bodies in the stock market to prevent price manipulation. The Dusk Network provides the same level of privacy enforced by regulators. Only, it eliminates the “trusted third party” and returns the power of disclosure directly to the user.

For instance, in the case of payment, it is the responsibility of the wallet holder to show the details of the transactions on request of the auditors (by providing a view-key). In the use case of security, compliant confidentiality is achieved with KYC built in the protocol and the use of zero knowledge accumulators to keep the whitelist confidential.

Besides that, everyone will be able to use the Dusk platform!

We are selling in private placement only which means the terms are private. To honour our own terms we can't just release the information about our investors. Wentworth Hall Family office is the only one we can disclose at the moment. We have several other high profile VCs especially in the confidentiality space. We will release one of the active investing partners this coming week. 

We are actually building our own blockchain with our own consensus mechanism. The token we'll release after the sale has been conducted is just the ERC20 equivalent. Dusk will NOT be building on top of Ethereum.

The state of the market should not have any influence on the development side of the project.

Sounds interesting, I'll see if there are any possibilities

SBA⋆ is a form of consensus. Currently the most used mechanisms for consensus are either PoW (proof-of-work, mining) and PoS (proof-of-stake, staking).

SBA⋆ uses existing ideas like Cryptographic Sortition(lottery), and combines it with concepts like stealth time-locked transactions to implement simple but secure communication that can be audited. SBA* makes use of a few different types of actors in the network to reach consensus:

• (super)Nodes. These are points in the network that facilitate transactions. They compete with each other for the generating and proposing blocks. These are computationally very light tasks, and a node will not require high computational power, or a big stake.
• Provisioners. These are nodes that have committed a certain minimum stake to the Dusk Network and take care of more intensive tasks such as block verification, voting, and notarization (VVN operations). These types of nodes are non-transactional.

By splitting tasks based on intensity and relaying them to transaction and non-transactional nodes the network’s speed greatly increases, whilst decreasing the chance of a partitioned network, and guaranteeing a higher availability of the network. Using SBA* there is no chance of an unintended fork of the blockchain, meaning there will be no doubt about what the main branch is. This translates into the appealing property of achieving transaction “finality” as soon as consensus is reached for a block.

The code is developed in a private Github repository and will be made public in sections after each section passes a security audit. An article detailing the development progress will be published each month.

Dusk is more than a privacy coin. I'd suggest you checkout our FAQ; https://dusk.network/faq/

Too much confidence indeed increases the risk of failure, rest-assured we didn't take this decision lightly and a lot of careful consideration went into the making of this decision!

Yes, we are building our own blockchain! I recommend you check out "Dusk in a Nutshell" which explains the Dusk Network in further detail!

Part 1; https://medium.com/dusk-network/dusk-in-a-nutshell-50b6e8a17c00

Part 2; https://medium.com/dusk-network/the-anonymous-network-layer-explained-ccb93fd222ca

Part 3; https://medium.com/dusk-network/sba-in-a-nutshell-67e5ae29489b

There is a great amount of demand from value-adding sale participants in our project. If we hadn't raised the cap we would be missing out on a lot of value contributors to the project. With this new cap we will also be able to speed up the development process, increase our marketing efforts, onboard corporate partnerships and conclude agreements with one of the world's leading exchanges. Since we increased the hardcap we also decided it would be more beneficial to the longevity of the platform if we removed the bonusses. More information about this will follow!

The token supply will not change. So 50% of the total supply which is 250m tokens, will be sold for 14.4M

Dusk Network Development Update - September

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



Development
Time to kickstart the development! September has been an interesting month as the team transitioned from theoretical research to standardizing and programming the core sections of the eventual platform. Our goal is to construct a modular implementation which will enable the developers to plug-and-play experimental features with ease. Golang is the programming language of choice for the reference implementation. The tipping point in favour of Golang has been its native support for concurrency, the bloodline of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

We have spent the month working on the basic wallet implementation, designing the transaction structures and building the networking layer. A lot of progress has been made in establishing the core documentation of the features and will help the team concentrate on the actual programming instead of worrying about undocumented features.

The code will be made public in sections after going through a rigorous formal verification and security audit process. The team is aiming to fulfil the original goal of launching the testnet in Q1.



Research
While the initial structure and the technical features of the platform had been finalized, our team is on a constant lookout for advancements in the fields of mathematics and computing science which could improve the efficiency and the security of the platform. One of the most exciting domain improvements that have been under our radar for some time are the advancements in cryptography. Specifically, the team has been exploring the possibility of using a Ristretto curve instead of a twisted Edwards birational equivalent of Curve25519 planned to be used in the genesis implementation. The Ristretto curves are related to bulletproofs, which have been the focal point of our research for a prolonged period. Additionally, we are exploring the possibility of using threshold signatures to implement a stealthy and a flexible alternative to multisignature addresses.

Aside from the cryptography, we are examining numerous approach vectors to employing zero-knowledge smart contracts on the platform, which will expand the feature set of the platform dramatically.

Finally, the team has been probing different fee structures and the crypto-economic effects of each of the proposed structures. Our eventual goal is to implement the structure least vulnerable to spam attacks while also retaining the affordable fees.



Community
A Discord server has been launched! Everybody is invited to join the discussions on our new medium of communication where the core team members will be present to answer your questions and guide you through the intricate features of the platform.

While there are no plans to involve the public in development until the devnet launch in December, we are working hard to establish Dawn public community after the launch to involve each and every one of you who is interested in helping our platform grow and prosper. More information will be revealed later.

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.

Please consider joining us at the following media:

• Website
• FAQ
• Telegram
• Twitter
• Reddit
• LinkedIn
• GitHub

Full nodes are general network nodes not participating in the consensus. Provisioner nodes are responsible for maintaining the consensus of the network. The term "master node" implies a permissioned access to the consensus, which SBA does not require.