What Is DUSK

Dusk Network brands itself as a privacy blockchain for financial applications. It is a layer-1 blockchain that powers the Confidential Security Contract (XSC) standard, and supports confidential smart contracts. Dusk Network aims to address the requirements and needs of financial markets. Central to its design are thus a scalable public infrastructure, direct settlement finality of transactions, and strict data privacy. Through the use of a novel transactional model called Phoenix, Dusk Network focuses to bring privacy and anonymity to transactions, as well as smart-contracts. Additionally, tokens deployed on Dusk Network can build on top of Zedger, a hybrid privacy-preserving model based on Phoenix, developed specifically for security tokens. The ‘Segregated Byzantine Agreement’ (SBA) consensus mechanism secures the network. According to the team from Dusk Network, SBA is an improvement over the underlying Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism as it combines existing ideas like "cryptographic sortition (lottery), stealth time-locked transactions (hidden stake amounts) and a reputation module to increase the chances of selecting honest nodes and further promote decentralization". DUSK tokens can be used as a utility token to initiate transactions, atomic swaps or deploy smart contracts. DUSK can also be staked to participate in consensus and serves as a means of exchanging DUSK-denominated value. In the future, the team intends to expand the use-cases of DUSK by adding it to an on-chain governance system.