Network nodes - transactional network clients. They compete with each other by locking an arbitrary amount for the generating and proposing of new blocks. Block generation is a computationally light task and therefore running a node does not require neither specialised equipment nor storage. The intention is for normal mobile devices to be able to run as a node within the network. The non-deterministic nature of the bidding process makes it so that even nodes bidding the minimum amount of DUSK have a fair chance to win the block generation sortition lottery

Provisioners - These are nodes that have committed a certain minimum stake to the Dusk Network and take care of more network intensive tasks such as block verification, voting, and notarization (VVN operations). These types of nodes are non-transactional
The intention is to create an economy where nodes compete for block rewards, while Provisioners earn a steady ROI.

The rewards paid to Provisioners are inversely proportional to their staked amount (i.e. bigger stakes get proportionally rewarded lesser, in respect to smaller stakes) and are earned regardless of Provisioners' participation in the VVN operations . This measure is not a viable option outside of the Dusk Blockchain, where the probability to win the sortition lottery and therefore take an active part to the SBA⋆ algorithm is not associated with a reward, except the sole payment of the transaction fees. This kind of economy not only prevents the rich get richer problem affecting Proof-of-stake, but it also incentivises users to decentralise their stakes into multiple Provisioners in order to obtain maximum financial gain. This latter point would lead to scalability problems in other consensus algorithms, while it does not have any significant impact on SBA⋆ due to its "Player Replaceability" property

Richard Sanders joins Dusk Network as Strategic Advisor

It is with great pleasure we announce that Cybersecurity Expert, Richard Sanders is joining Dusk Network as a strategic advisor.



When he was 17 years old, Richard joined the US Army where he served as a forward observer at the 10th Mountain Division for four years. During his work in the Army he pushed himself into a Spartan lifestyle, making the most out of each day with a main focus on self-development. This allowed him to nearly finish his undergraduate degree at the end of his fourth year military discharge. Later he finished his Bachelor’s Degree in Homeland Security at the American Military University. Richard holds a Harvard Business School CORe certification.

His volunteer work at an animal shelter made him realize the importance of giving back to the community and he has since been an avid philanthropist. He has raised over 100,000 USD for various non-profit organizations on a yearly basis for seven years consecutively.

Richard is an active member in the blockchain investigative community. In 2018 Richard co-founded Blockchain Investigation Agency CipherBlade where he is the Chief Security Officer (CSO). CipherBlade focuses on helping new aspiring blockchain projects to stay safe in this highly dynamic industry that unfortunately attracts some ill-intended malicious actors.

Richard already participated in the investigation of various high-profile blockchain industry related hacks like the EtherDelta hack late last year and a more recent hack, involving blockchain and cryptocurrency investor Ian Balina, where he is the lead investigator. Leveraging his connections within government and law enforcement, Rich’s efforts have led to arrest, prosecution, and asset recovery for several cases; an impressive accomplishment on a brief timeline.

As a decentralized ecosystem focused on privacy and transparency in payments, communication and asset ownership transfer Dusk Network values safety very highly. Richard will be a great asset to Dusk as he is a professional in the cybersecurity, intelligence and government space and we believe we can greatly benefit from his expertise.

We at Dusk Network are very excited to have Richard on board as an advisor!

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

That's correct! You can read more about STO's vs ICO's here

The sale is done through private placement only. We are selling 250M Dusk tokens. This is 50% of the supply. We will consider 100 ETH minimum investments. Please e-mail pledge@dusk.network with your sales proposal. Dusk will give preferential treatment to buyers who have a clear value add to the Dusk Network and its development.

We are building our own blockchain, yes!

We will start off as an ERC-20 token and will swap to our native token when we have the mainnet ready! 

Gary Quin joins Dusk Network as Strategic Advisor

We are pleased to announce that Gary Quin, a Senior Advisor to Credit Suisse and the former CEO of Blackrock Communications, is supporting The Dusk Foundation as a Strategic Advisor for the Dusk Network!



Gary Quin is a 25-year veteran of the telecommunications and media space with knowledge of the European, the Middle Eastern, African and even Latin American market. Gary’s expertise is in the building, financing, and acquisition of profitable businesses that operate in the sector, and draws heavily from his four years spent at Conolly Corporate Finance as a Managing Director in Ireland and his time with MNO Digicel in the Caribbean. At CCF Gary oversaw the provision of financial advisory services to telecommunications and media clients for mergers and acquisitions, private equity leveraged buyouts and so on.

After leaving CCF in 2005, Gary joined Blackrock Communications as CEO. In keeping with the theme of Gary’s career, Blackrock is a consulting firm that focuses on private equity and debt financing mostly in the telecoms and media space.

In 2010 Credit Suisse EMEA called on Gary to become a Senior Advisor and lead their investment banking and capital markets division in Ireland. Since signing on Gary has led Credit Suisse to Euromoney’s 2011 award for Best Investment Bank in Ireland and has raised over €12bn for Irish corporates since 2013 including 5 IPOs and the largest REIT IPO in EMEA since 2010 and largest Irish IPO since 2007. He continues to serve in this capacity at present.

Gary received his MBA from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and his BA (Honours) from University College Cork, Ireland. He has also studied at the Harvard Business School, IESE and the University of Oxford. His thesis was on the development of the European High Yield and Leveraged Finance market.

The Dusk Foundation benefits significantly from his senior management experience in both telecommunications and investment banking. Gary also comes to the project with plenty of experience sitting on corporate boards as a non-executive director. This gives us the added advantage of having guided foresight, independent and impartial critique, access to third-party consultants, and strategic direction for the commercial attractiveness of the project as a whole.

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

The Startup Dream; ICO’s vs STO’s.

Introduction
2017 seemed like the dream year for startups and entrepreneurs. With funding becoming ever more difficult, startups seemed to have found the answer to the funding conundrum in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).

In 2017, ICOs raised around $3.88 billion over a total of 210 different ICOs.

The amount raised reached up to $258 million raised by a single ICO is 2017.

This huge amount of money raised allowed for startups to find their way to life. In 2018, the floodgates were truly opened as the year showed a significant jump in the amount of money raised.

As of July 2018, ICOs raised a total of more than $12 billion with 5 months left to go. That is more than a 200% percent increase in about half the time.

A total of 546 ICOs have been run so far with the largest ICO raising $1.7 billion.

The Growth of Ethereum and The Need for Regulations
The increased number of ICOs resulted in a huge demand for Ethereum which ended up being the main platform to fund ICOs. Being a relatively stable network combined with the relative ease of deploying Ethereum smart contracts helped crown Ethereum as the main platform to launch ICOs and fund upcoming promising projects. ERC20 tokens were issued by projects and sold over Ethereum smart contracts in return for funding the startups. This naturally increased the demand for Ethereum as more investors looked to invest into ICOs in hopes for high returns on investment. Eventually, the price of Ether rose from around 31 cents during its crowdsale to an all-time high price of more than $1400. At the time of writing this article, Ethereum is floating in the range of $300 which is still around 1000x the initial price of Ether. Clearly, the ICO use case of Ether drove high adoption rates and high demand.

With the increased attention ICOs seem to be getting, regulatory requirements are getting more real every day. Considering that most the tokens that are being sold claim to be utility tokens, the chances for exit scams or failed investments increase significantly. Despite the jump in funding between 2017 and 2018, ICOs are becoming harder to participate in. Most of today’s ICOs are struggling to stay within the regulatory requirements and are trying to be safe by limiting the public access to ICOs and making the ICOs available to private accredited investors only. However, that seems to be a temporary solution to the problem as the regulations get tighter. Eventually, chances are that ICOs will inevitably make room for a more regulated landscape. With adoption comes regulations and such regulations may be satisfied with Security Token Offering (STOs).

Security Tokens vs Utility Tokens
Most of today’s ICOs claim to be giving Utility Tokens to their investors. Those tokens hold practically no value but they are more like future vouchers to use the company’s services once they are in live, assuming that the company does deliver a working project. This means that if the company fails or a product is never launched, the tokens that the investor bought hold ZERO value to the investor. This also means that the value of the token (or the voucher) that investors get will depend on the adoption of the project’s services. With such huge risks for investors, Security Tokens will come into play. Unlike Utility tokens, Security Tokens can be backed by company assets such as shares or voting power or any other right to a real asset.This clearly provides a much more solid and safe investment for the investor who believes in the company’s future.

The Need for Regulations
With that in mind, STOs now seem to be the answer to the problems raised by ICOs. They will provide safer investments for investors and reduce the chance of scams or manipulated projects. However, STOs will need some sort of regulation to run properly and not run into legal issues. As of now, we can more or less assume that such regulation would be similar to those assigned to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). This is a more or less safe assumption until the actual ICO/STO regulations are announced and put into action. If that is the case, then the ERC20 tokens currently used for ICOs cannot satisfy those regulations in their present state.



For instance, trade secrecy and privacy of the ecosystem will be essential for STOs in order to prevent illegal activities such as market manipulation and insider trading. That is one of the major problems with having funding processes happen the way they do today over public chains. For example, if company X who happens to be a hugely successful investment fund moves $5 million into an STO on a public chain, the resulting buying and investing hype would be unheard of. In a regulated market, that is illegal and with regulations reaching the crypto space, one can assume that the future will hold similar regulations for cryptocurrencies. Not only is market manipulation illegal, it generally deters institutional investors such as Company X from investing in such projects as their total investment will be easily visible to the public eye over the public chains. The same works vice versa when a firm wants to close or diminish a position, currently often using what’s called a Dark Pool.

Dusk Network
This is where Dusk Network comes in. Dusk Network is a complete ecosystem that provides privacy measures that are practically impossible to breach. A key part of the Dusk ecosystem will revolve around compliant digital asset transfer. Not only will it provide the privacy required for the market, but it will also provide the auditability required by regulators. KYC requirements can be built directly into the token, thus satisfying a wide array of use cases.

Dusk Network is aiming to be the platform to run STOs the way Ethereum is for ICOs. The nature of the platform with the aim at true privacy will make it uniquely suited for hosting STOs. In other words, the platform has the potential to innately satisfy all the likely requirements and regulations that will be assigned to future STOs. The privacy provided over Dusk Network will prevent any sort of market manipulation or insider trading since all the actions that are taken by investors are hidden from the rest of the world. The encryptions provided are the solution for the future of crowdfunding methods that allow startups to continue funding their upcoming projects while also abiding by all the governmental regulations. This will ensure the security for both the investors as well as the STOs in question.



To summarize the solutions Dusk Network provides for the future of STOs:

• A Platform to run STOs fully.
• Dusk Network will be the home for XST (Anonymous Security Tokens) tokens the way Ethereum is for ERC20 tokens
• Dusk Network will provide complete on-chain privacy for the investors and hence completely abide by the anticipated regulations for funding future projects, whilst also satisfying regulators.
• The privacy provided by Dusk Network will be the catalyst needed to attract institutional investors for future STOs as investors can’t legally have their investments made public
  

Conclusion

Dusk Network is laser focused on delivering three key use cases: payments, digital asset transfer, and p2p communication. It will provide an ecosystem that allows for the best tradeoff between privacy and transparency. The market shifting towards the Security Token space will be a great fit with an innately suitable architecture like the Dusk Network.

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

Why Fungibility Matters

The concept of the Blockchain first bubbled to the surface of our cyber-consciousness in mid-2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto published a whitepaper titled “BitCoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System”. The paper presented the first use case for the technology — a digital currency.

Since then many developers have thought up other use cases and have pitched for funding to bring their ideas to fruition. According to an article published in April, cryptocurrency startups have raised over USD 6 Billion in 2018 alone by selling their crypto coins to early backers; similar to how shares of a company get sold to investors. These are called Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).

However, a report produced by Fabric Ventures in collaboration with Token Data reviewed 2017 statistics and found that only 48% of ICO funded crypto startups were successful. Compound this with the scarcity of projects bringing in-demand, functional value, and the marketplace’s exposure to fraudulent ICO campaigns on a regular basis. Your average business owner will no doubt take a ‘wait and see’ approach before putting their business functions or applications onto a blockchain.

At present, the majority of enterprise blockchain solutions are for the financial technology sector. It is understandably so because the cryptocurrency market acts as proof of concept. In implementing the solution, the industry tends to opt for ‘private’ (permissioned) blockchains, where they run their blockchain in a sort of private Intranet and restrict connectivity to outside networks. That’s fine for now, but if we want to exploit the full benefits of this technology, then we must accept that private (permissioned) blockchains are a suboptimal solution.

For mass adoption to take place, there are specific assurances that the user must have. Perhaps the most important of them all is the assurance that their data is fungible.

Fungibility Matters
Fungibility is a legacy of the trade practices of the Roman Empire. We can trace it back to the Latin verb ‘fungere’ which means ‘to perform’. It is the idea that when trading perishable goods we must assure that one portion of its weight is of equal value to any other portion if they are of the same weight. So one bale of wheat performs the same function as any other bale of wheat when traded in the same marketplace.

When we began to use paper currency, this idea was carried over. If a buyer had a 50 Euro note that was either lost or destroyed, it was in the best interest of the marketplace to allow the buyer to replace it with an equivalent 50 Euro note. Regardless of the source. So the idea of fungibility exists because it promotes ease and efficiency of trade. It is a requirement for basic addition, and interchangeability of said good or currency.



Fungibility in Blockchain Networks
Since the first use case for the blockchain was a digital currency Satoshi Nakamoto carried over the idea of fungibility to promote ease and efficiency of information exchange; just like in the marketplace.

However, in the case of Bitcoin true fungibility has not been achieved, and many subsequent tokens or cryptocurrencies are not fungible. Although it is true that 1 BTC + 1 BTC = 2 BTC, we are starting to see this potentially changing in the future. Due to the complete open and transparent nature of the bitcoin blockchain there is a full record of all transaction ever done. Some of these might have been done with malicious intent or for fraudulent activities. Because of the nature of the blockchain we know exactly which bitcoins were used for ‘bad things’. Now a company might not want to associate itself with these types of activities and therefore only want ‘clean’ bitcoins. This means that one bitcoin suddenly isn’t the same anymore as another bitcoin, and could lead to a premium being paid for a clean bitcoin, as opposed to one with a negative history, regardless of them being technically identical. There are some counter movements such as ‘Washing’ or ‘Mixing’ bitcoin that effectively try to reduce your exposure to ‘bad’ bitcoins but it is easy to see how this aspect of the bitcoin blockchain might prove troublesome in the future.

With the assurance of real fungibility the widespread adoption of blockchain technology is more likely, not just in the financial tech space. If it is possible for the origin of a crypto coin to be invisible from the rest of the network, then the same is possible for other forms of data as well. The knowledge that data is protected, at the deepest possible encryption levels, will give individual users, businesses and institutions the confidence to use applications built on top of it.

It Matters to the Dusk Foundation
The Dusk Foundation is created to advance the research and development of the unrestricted, un-surveilled and fully distributed blockchain-based cryptosystem called Dusk Network.

The Foundation believes in promoting an ecosystem of bi-directional peer-to-peer data transmission networks that are private, immutable, scalable and decentralized. This belief is why the Dusk Network is designed to offer these features to businesses and developers who have applications that require high bandwidth and low latency while remaining secure and private.

The network protocol is optimized for speed — completion times to show proofs or achieve consensus have been reduced, and data packets are bundled to use bandwidth efficiently. The network is built to scale — the Dusk team have developed a Segregated Byzantine Consensus algorithm that guides the growth of the blockchain while maintaining its integrity.

The Scope is laser focused, but the possibilities are endless
At the Dusk Foundation we focus on one thing; privacy, in all its flavors. Of course there are many relevant technical aspects to the network to empower this, such as the all important fungibility. However providing various degrees of privacy, whether for a file streaming service, financial transaction, security token, or video game interaction.

We encourage everyone who believes in personal freedom, economic liberty, information pluralism, and the right to privacy, to follow the development of the project at our Telegram channel. For more details on how the technology works, please visit our website and read the project’s white paper.

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

Thank you

Dusk Network - update

In our last update we announced our partnership with Kryha and Aylon Morley (which story has been picked up by cryptocoinupdates.com, and since we've been working hard behind the scenes. We provide a glimpse of what's going on behind the scenes in this update.

- TNO and Dusk officially took the first step toward a strategic partnership by signing a memorandum and formalizing their intent of forming a EU based blockchain consortium and leading the cryptographic research within the Dusk Network ecosystem. TNO stands for Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research and is the most prominent applied research thinktank in the Netherlands. We will share more on this story later!

- We are shaping the public development effort for Dusk Network. This means interviewing developers who will join the public developer group and carving out the processes to make it a succes.

- We have been interviewed by various newsoutlets. Below is a small excerpt of a question we are most exciting about covered by Base.info
Read the full article here!
Q: Describe your project in 3 years? Will it change something in the world?
A: Tokenization of security is the first step toward the automation of organization governance. This is in par with the vision surrounding the so called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Tokenizing equity leads to automating cashflow stream, which in turns leads to autonomous governance, and finally business automation and autonomous organization

Security tokens are a necessary initial step and we want to contribute by adding the missing attribute of confidentiality in order to ignite an ecosystem which will hopefully evolve toward the implementation of autonomous decentralized companies. We want to achieve that by letting such organizations avail of an efficient and secure communication infrastructure together with access to many different blockchains in the spirit of interoperation.

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

Secure Tunnel Switching Explained

What is the Dusk Network?
The Dusk Network is a decentralized infrastructure focused on providing the sweet-spot between privacy and transparency in payments, communication and asset ownership transfers. It departs from consensus mechanisms like PoW/PoS, which are poorly suited for privacy, to introduce a new privacy-oriented consensus mechanism called Segregated Byzantine Agreement. Dusk is a new blockchain that provides true privacy and a fast and a secure streaming mechanism called Secure Tunnel Switching (STS), all powered by a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency: DUSK.

In this introductory series we aim to take a look at specific aspects of the Dusk Network and explain them in a nutshell. In this article we will look at Dusk’s Secure Tunnel Switching (STS) mechanism, a circuit switching technique allowing for safe p2p transfer.

For a detailed description of Dusk’s STS please refer to the whitepaper.

What is Secure Tunnel Switching?
As explained in our previous article Dusk Network uses an advanced version of Garlic Routing. The obfuscation of someone’s identity and IP address becomes highly relevant when we are not simply transacting, but also communicating. The Anonymous Network Layer can be viewed as an entry point to the Dusk Network, after which a user could decide to communicate directly with a peer, thus progressing to the Secure Tunnel Switching layer for a voice or video call. Put simply, Secure Tunnel Switching is a circuit switching technique inspired by the payphone, allowing decentralized pay-as-you-go, as well as increased security. You can use STS for all types of high data rate communications, such as streaming (unidirectional) or voice/video calls (bidirectional).

Before we delve deeper into how tunnel switching improves privacy, one practical implication that immediately comes to mind is: ‘how are transaction costs regulated? Because if the value of the Dusk token can fluctuate, how do I know how much I am going to spend on a certain real-time audio, video or data transfer?’. In order to answer this question, let’s use the following example: node A (Alice) wants to establish a secure data stream with node B (Bob), for which it knows the relevant Dusk address. Before establishing any connection attempt, Alice will commit a payment using an off-chain transaction towards a so-called State Channel Access Point (SCAP), for a dynamic value that will be auto-regulated by the Dusk core. This is done to keep the transmission cost stable, and also independent from token fluctuations.

How does it work?
When two parties, Alice and Bob, want to communicate directly they can use STS to do so. Alice commits a payment to a SCAP, hereby freezing her status on the blockchain until communication closes. A communication circuit is then opened towards Bob, through a various number of gateway nodes that can support the required data stream. Bob starts to receive said data stream and Alice and Bob are now communicating. Assuming Alice wants to continue communication for a reasonable amount of time, say longer than a minute, she will be opening a new circuit (tunnel) towards Bob in parallel to the first one. Bob will receive both data streams simultaneously and uses a technique called bitmatching, simply put Bob will correlate both streams until they are perfectly synchronized. When this happens then Bob will drop the old stream, and continue communication purely through the new one. This process repeats itself as Alice and Bob continue communications. This procedure will repeat for as long as Alice renews the transactions costs with the SCAS to keep streaming data.



Whilst this process brings along some time lag in the VoIP call (solved by bitmatching) it dramatically improves security and anonymity over a conventional Garlic Tunnel connection. By switching the data tunnel at regular intervals, a malicious attacker would be unable to predict compromised nodes, perform DDoS attacks, and in general exploit vulnerabilities on the network. Assuming an interval of 1 minute per tunnel a malicious node would never hold more than a minute of highly encrypted information sent between peers that he does not know and has no way of identifying.

Additionally, Dusk Network will offer the capability to transfer files, both online and offline, over its network in an decentralized, anonymous and secure fashion. To implement this on the network, Dusk combines the capabilities of the anonymous peer discovery and gossip mechanism previously described with those of a third party decentralized and anonymous storage service (for example the Orc Object Storage). In case the receiving user is offline, the file will remain, for example, downloadable for 30 days after the day of sending the file.

Payphone analogy
As alluded to earlier the Secure Tunnel Switching mechanism is highly inspired by the traditional payphone. Alice performs a state channel payment in a similar fashion as you would enter a token or coin into a payphone to open a connection. The payphone also uses circuiting to connect you to the correct recipient, and as soon as your connection has been made your timer starts running down. If you wanted to continue talking, you would simply enter another coin or token and you could keep calling using the payphone. STS is very similar, except that rather than a single payphone you could imagine an endless corridor filled with payphones, and every time your minute almost runs out you put your next coin into a different payphone, that uses a different circuit, to reach a different payphone on the receiving side.



Conclusion
Dusk Network uses STS as a mechanism to allow for high data rate, secure transmission and communication between peers, using state channels, and a cryptographically secure pay as you go mechanism.

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 tradeoff 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

Dusk Network Partners with Kryha to create the First Blockchain Consortium to Tackle Privacy & Regulatory Compliance.

Dusk Network partners up with Kryha to develop the first blockchain project in the EU that reconciles decentralized privacy with transparency.



Amsterdam — July 2018 — Dusk Foundation, the not-for-profit blockchain research organization, is announcing its partnership with Kryha, the project and management company responsible for the development of blockchain-based products. Kryha and Dusk Foundation will complete the technological roadmap of the Dusk Network, its decentralized infrastructure that secures privacy-enabled financial transactions, communication, and asset ownership transfers among peers, and promote its capabilities within the European Union.

Dusk Foundation is the leading company and coordinator of the European Consortium, aiming to develop and implement the Dusk Network technology. The Dusk Network provides users with an unsurveilled platform, promoting freedom of self-expression and economic initiative using a cryptocurrency that is centered on privacy. Through the Dusk Network, Dusk Foundation reconciles the right to privacy with regulatory compliance by enabling the proper confidentiality for a variety of use cases, from a surveillance-free solution to blocked communication and data transmission, to KYC-enabled issuance and transfer of tokenized securities.

Kryha is an award-winning company involved in the development of blockchain-based products within many international corporations and local administrations. Kryha has proven experience reconciling the gaps between blockchain-based endeavors and their need to comply with various regulations centered around transparency. As Dusk’s newest development partner, Kryha will implement changes and illustrate vital expertise within the newly constructed consortium, while simultaneously enhancing exposure of the Dusk Network to their current clientele.

Kryha winning the Blockchaingers Machine-to-Machine hackathon.

Together, Kryha and the Dusk Foundation will represent the consortium as they explore potential development partners within the EU. Notably, Kryha has a track record of receiving high-profile funding, having previously won a variety of research grants within the Netherlands, such as the MIT Top Sector innovation grant.

“At Dusk Foundation, we’re embarking on an exciting journey that will surely lead to a flourishing and committed consortium of blockchain-based development partners under the aegis of the European Union,” says Emanuele Francioni, Project and Tech Lead of Dusk Foundation. “We couldn’t be prouder of our new partner and addition to the consortium, Kryha, who we look forward to working with as they provide insightful expertise critical to the Dusk Network technology and its roadmap.”

“We’re excited to work with Dusk Foundation and contribute to the Dusk Network technology as we lend our guidance to the already impressive project making great strides in the field of privacy and research,” says Tobias Disse, CEO of Kryha. “As a team and active development partner within the consortium, Dusk Foundation and Kryha will bring blockchain to the European masses and implement its technology to the fullest.”

About Dusk:
The Dusk Foundation is a not-for-profit that governs the fundraising and realization of the Dusk Network. Its main task is to advance the research and development of the unrestricted, unsurveilled and fully distributed blockchain-based Dusk Network, while promoting the utilization and diffusion of its digital cash, DUSK. The objective of the Dusk Foundation is to advance the sustainability of a true decentralized ecosystem, conceived to protect the right to privacy, which is an existential prerequisite for confidential business activities, state security, human and business relationships, and ultimately, personal freedom.

About Kryha:
Kryha was founded in 2017 as a multidisciplinary team of blockchain experts with a proven track record of designing and building effective prototypes and products with blockchain technology. Working for both the private and public sector, Kryha has extensive experience in guiding clients through the process of selecting use cases, designing concepts, and building prototypes. Previously, Kryha has worked with many established corporations and local administrations that include Shell, KLM, and the Municipality of Amsterdam.

Please consider joining us at the following media:

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

Aylon Morley joins Dusk Network as Strategic Advisor

Dusk Network is happy to announce that the partner and investment director for Wentworth Hall Family Office, Aylon Morley, has joined Dusk Network as a strategic partner. Aylon is an accomplished entrepreneur and investor.

Aylon is an active member in the Blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. He has worked extensively with Fintech and Blockchain startups globally and is a passionate Blockchain advocate and communicator.



For the last 11 years he has served as the Tech Investment Director for Wentworth Hall, a London-based family office that specialises in private equity ventures and start up investing.

With more than 16 years of experience in the capital markets under his belt, Aylon previously worked as a financial journalist for Reuters and as Business Development Director for Granite Alphen Capital, an algorithmic hedge fund.

Since 2016, Aylon has been invited to speak at international conferences on the transformative technology of the decentralised ledger. He has advised and mentored diverse startups at Barclays fintech hub, Techstars accelerator, and StartupBootcamp, to name a few. His belief in our project and getting him on board is a great testament to the quality of the project Dusk Network is promising to deliver.

His position, connections, and experience will help Dusk Network get the project running in terms of investments. His experience with advising startups will also be a huge factor in supporting Dusk Network continue to achieve further success as we start hitting our major milestones. We are excited to welcome Aylon Onboard!

‘This is one of the most impressive whitepapers I have seen for a long time. It’s the only project I know that is working on allowing both privacy and transparency on the same blockchain. Their focus on facilitating STO propositions suits this purpose extremely well. Together with the talented team, I know the Dusk Network will be a success’
 — Aylon Morley Director of Wentworth Hall Family Office

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

What exactly do you mean?

Appreciate your support 

Thank you for your support, we will definitely give more low-entry explainations later on!

A brief introduction to cryptography in blockchain

History
People in the cryptocurrency space often throw around the abbreviation ‘crypto’ when they mean cryptocurrencies. However, before cryptocurrencies were a thing, ‘crypto’ used to mean ‘cryptography’ — the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of, potentially malicious, third parties[1]. Cryptography in this sense has existed since mankind sought a way to communicate between allies without a potential third party being able to decipher what was being communicated.

Up until the invention of the internet, this was the main use case of cryptography. However, since the early days of the internet, people have started thinking of ways to decentralize ‘money’ and how to create a financial system which is beyond control of governments or central banks. But in order to convince the masses that such a radical system could be trusted and that it was in fact secure, this needed to be proved first. Thus, a cryptographic solution was sought. Because even though what would be communicated would not be a message in the strictest definition of the word, the communication, or transfer of value in this case, needs to be as secure as possible.

Multiple different ‘solutions’ were proposed: such as hashcash, which was developed by Adam Back; b-money, which was developed by Wei Dai; and Bit Gold, developed by Nick Szabo. These proposals had one or two things in common; they were based around a proof-of-work consensus mechanism and they had a limited supply. Especially the latter part was deemed to be important in order to gain widespread trust, and potentially adoption. Because how many people would trust a radical financial system invented by a random person, who, at any point in time, could inflate this monetary system to infinity? Many iterations were created, but it wasn’t until Satoshi Nakamoto came along that this idea started to grow some legs.

On the 31st of October, 2008, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” was posted to a cryptography mailing list. This (white)paper discussed and proposed how to create a peer-to-peer network and generate a trust-less electronic cash system. On the 3rd of January, 2009, the Bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the so-called genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain. [Contrary to what many people think, Satoshi Nakamoto did not coin the term ‘blockchain’ to refer to this system; Satoshi Nakamoto referred to this system as a ‘proof-of-work chain’, as it was secured by a proof-of-work consensus mechanism.] Satoshi Nakamoto realized early on that a central point of authority (or failure in this case) would hinder the progress and adoption of such a radical new system. This is why Satoshi Nakamoto left the Bitcoin [project] in 2011, and the name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ itself is just a pseudonym.

So whilst Satoshi Nakamoto is shrouded in mystery, blockchain technology is not. On the contrary, a blockchain is “an [immutable] digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value”[2]. These transactions are put into ‘blocks’, where new blocks are linked to previous blocks thereby forming what we call a ‘block-chain’. Transactions that take place on the Bitcoin blockchain are fully transparent and can be viewed by anyone who wish to do so.



Challenges & Advancements in Cryptography
Blockchains ‘solve’ the cryptographic ‘problem’ of communication without possible third-party intervention and removes the need for intermediaries. Set up in a decentralized fashion, a blockchain allows you to: buy and sell without a bank, bet without a bookie, get a loan without an underwriter, create an identity without a government and verify records without a notary.

It is important to make a distinction here between centralized and decentralized blockchains. Blockchains, especially private (and often centralized) blockchains, continue to gain significant interest from corporations across the world. However, despite this growing interest in private blockchains, we are not convinced that these are all that they are promised to be. A centralized (private) blockchain is often just a slow, impractical, inefficient database. In our opinion true innovation lies with blockchains which are not only decentralized (like the Bitcoin blockchain) but also open-source, permission-less, trust-less, and featuring a fungible currency.

However, whilst blockchains are extremely secure, there is another challenge that comes with it: transparency, which is both a blessing and a curse. Blockchains, like the Bitcoin blockchain for example, are fully transparent where anyone can see all the details of the transactions which are being made. Sending addresses, receiving addresses and amounts are all publicly available. Which is why in the past some Bitcoin have been blacklisted due to their less than dubious origins in the eyes of authorities. This is also a reason why freshly minted Bitcoin, with little transaction history, have a higher asking price on the black market compared to ‘regular’ Bitcoin. In our eyes this is a deficiency, as it proves that Bitcoins themselves are not fungible, i.e. they are not interchangeable between one another, the way (fiat) cash is.

In order to mitigate this challenge, the Dusk blockchain will make use of various anonymity and privacy features in order to provide a private, yet fully auditable, blockchain. We believe that transparency and privacy are a trade-off, and that there should be flexibility. With the Dusk Network we aim to provide the best trade-off between transparency and privacy.

Dusk Network will make use of a whole stack of different technologies and mechanisms to boost privacy on both the application and networking layer. For a full, technical, explanation of these various mechanisms we invite you to consult our whitepaper.

Stealth addresses
Inspired by the CryptoNote white paper, stealth addresses are the basis of Dusk recipient hiding technique. It is the proven choice for concealing the true recipient address of a transaction while keeping uniqueness within the context of the ledger. This means that no other address can be linked to a stealth address. Additionally, the creation of an unbound number of receiving addresses is also possible without any of them allowing traceability back to the recipient’s address. Effectively, stealth addresses are as secure as using a creating a different wallet for every single receiving transactions so that it becomes impossible to link the transactions to each other.

Ring Signature Confidential Transactions (RingCTs) and Bulletproof Transactions
Ring Signatures are an efficient, established way to obfuscate the input of a transaction by making use of a sender’s account keys and a number of decoy keys (called outputs) taken directly from the blockchain. The procedure allows one of the members of the ring to sign messages on behalf of the whole group, and by doing so it renders it infeasible to know exactly which member signed.

Blockchains such as Monero (XMR) use a particular breed of ring signatures called Ring Signatures Confidential Transactions (RingCT). In this setup, privacy is taken one step further by not only giving anonymity at the sender level, but also on the amount spent and destination. RingCT technology makes transactions thus virtually unlinkable to the original sender.

However, in the future, Dusk aims to move away to RingCTs to Bulletproof Transactions once this technology is fully ready to be used. At the time of writing, first tests show a tenfold reduction in transaction size and verification times compared to RingCTs. Given the “pluggable” nature of Dusk core, the underlying software for transaction generation will be kept flexible through an architecture that facilitates the adoption of a future implementation of Bulletproof Transactions.

Cryptographic accumulator
Finally, a cryptographic accumulator will be used. A cryptographic accumulator is a cryptographic construction that allows for efficient insertions and proofs of membership, without revealing the identity of the sender[3]. An accumulator takes a set of values and turns them into a single number of constant size[4]. Different technologies exist that implement accumulators with different level of computational efficiency and security requirements. In order to guarantee the anonymity of the transactions passing through the accumulator, Dusk is evaluating various technologies, such as: RSA accumulators, Expressive Bilinear Accumulators, and Elliptic Curve Multiset Hash (ECMH). ECMH is looking as an appealing alternative to the other known algorithms to construct Accumulators, especially since the method is unencumbered with the necessity of a trusted setup.

Conclusion
Dusk Features untraceability through the use of RingCT, unlikability through the use of stealth addresses and protection from double spending or blockchain forks through the novel consensus mechanism called SBA. It takes the latest lessons learned in cryptography and prepares for the future through an adaptable core ready for bulletproof transactions.

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
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• LinkedIn
• GitHub

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