Founded in 2018, Dusk is a Layer-1 blockchain designed to provide institutional-level privacy and compliance to enable anyone to trade real-world assets through a wallet. Designed for regulated and decentralized finance, Dusk aims to evolve the financial landscape by making it possible to bring regulated assets on-chain.

Dusk’s three core pillars are: privacy and compliance to bring institutional-grade assets into anyone’s wallet.

Dusk's research team uses cryptographically secure zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to maintain privacy and has been a leader in the development of ZKPs and has published papers on their work. The custom ZKP virtual machine Piecrust is the first virtual machine of its kind, breaking new ground in the blockchain and privacy space.

With a range of products including Citadel, a ZKP-licensed product ideal for KYC/AML procedures as well as a subscription-based model, Dusk is building the infrastructure for the economy of the future.

Benefits for businesses and institutions include automated and programmable compliance, instant settlement finality, and access to unified liquidity. By using private smart contracts, Dusk is even able to provide a level of privacy higher than what banks and institutions are accustomed to.

For users, Dusk offers the possibility to break out of the crypto sandbox and allow them to trade real-world regulated assets as easily and autonomously as they trade digital assets.

The Dusk Network is a proof-of-stake (PoS) network powered and secured by the DUSK token. The blockchain is public and open, and anyone can use and participate in the consensus mechanism. Validators can secure the network by staking DUSK to run nodes and use DUSK to pay for transactions.

Dusk focuses on bringing privacy and anonymity to transactions and smart contracts by using a transaction model called Phoenix. Additionally, tokens deployed on Dusk can be built on Zedger, a hybrid privacy-preserving model specifically modeled for security tokens.

The "Segregated Byzantine Agreement" (SBA) consensus mechanism ensures network security. The SBA stated that this is an improvement over the underlying PoS mechanism as it combines existing ideas such as cryptographic lots (lotteries), invisible time-locked transactions (private stake amounts), and reputation modules to increase the chance of selecting honest nodes and further facilitate decentralization. Centralization.