DUSK

Empowering Financial Freedom with Self-Custody and Compliance Automation

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While the vision of Dusk is simple, the steps and necessary components to execute it can be difficult to understand.

Dusk’s mission is to return complete and direct control to the user over

their own assets.

While the mission might appear deceptively simple, it does require a

fundamental rethinking of mainstream technology. Such an overhaul

comprises of a decentralized ledger to serve as a global settlement

layer, zero-knowledge cryptography to safeguard private data, and

essential protocols such as Citadel and Zedger. Citadel enables

privacy-preserving digital identity on Dusk, and Zedger provides a

regulatory framework for the compliant handling of financial

instruments.

new developments in zero-knowledge cryptography, computing security, and

They’re responsible for developing breakthrough technology such

as PlonKup, Succinct Attestation, Phoenix, etc.

then implements those technologies into our software libraries, which

form the foundation of our blockchain and virtual machine stack. Dusk’s

libraries are also widely adopted by many other projects.

We also have a team of regulatory experts who tackle official matters

that most other projects tend to avoid. With so many different aspects

in play, it’s clear that Dusk is a game-changer.

To sum it up, we want to give you an overview of the key building blocks

of Dusk, how they fit together, and most importantly, why and how they

will change the way we approach finance and ownership for the better.

The topics we will cover are:

- The current limitations

- Dusk’s solution

- Zero-knowledge proofs

- Automated Regulation

- On-chain tokenization

The limitations of the current financial system current financial system has a lot of limitations, many of which we

take for granted and blindly accept just the way they are. Those

limitations present challenges to both individuals and institutions.

Individuals have limited autonomy over their assets due to the custodial

nature of our financial systems. We let someone else hold our assets,

from government bonds to salaries in a bank. This is mainly because the

practicality of holding gold bars or piles of cash at home is quite

debatable.

Institutions, on the other hand, have huge overhead costs and allocate

significant resources toward regulatory compliance and data management.

This process is replicated across each bank, with very little scaling or

universal solutions, despite the other banks doing exactly the same

thing. Not to mention liquidity being fractured across all these

custodians.

The lack of self-custody translates directly into a stagnation ofinnovation in the financial market and an abundance of inefficiencies.For example, arbitrage, which aims to correct and profit from price inefficiencies, is risky and out of reach for most people in traditional

financial infrastructure. In contrast, the DeFi market provides

innovative technology, such as flash-loans, that are freely available to

everyone. The lack of self-custody and direct control over digital

assets stifles innovation and creates barriers to financial inclusion

and economic freedom.

Dusk’s solution

Dusk’s solution is to provide infrastructure that is intrinsically

compliant, private, and efficient. We believe that by embedding these

principles directly within the core protocol, we’ll not only enable

greater opportunities for innovation and wealth, but, most importantly,

we will help the transition toward a fairer and more inclusive economy,

where direct ownership and value play a fundamental role in empowering

everyone to achieve financial freedom.

The protocol is engineered as a decentralized ledger technology (DLT)

capable of providing fast transaction settlement, as well as immediate

finality, and sybil-resistance. Every node in Dusk’s network is equipped

with software with native support for zero-knowledge cryptography (ZK),

which ensures the privacy and scalability of the ledger and its

transactions. This is different from all other blockchains that use ZK,

where the technology is kept separate from network protocol.

Instead, Dusk protocol makes use of ZK cryptography everywhere, from

Rusk, our confidential smart contract platform, to all other

functionalities, such as Citadel, a zero-knowledge proof, soulbound NFT

that is ideal for digital identity and universal KYC.

The next thing we must consider is regulation. In order to break out of

the crypto sandbox and interact with real-world financial instruments,

it’s necessary to ensure compliance with the regulatory frameworks that

govern those assets, such as stablecoins, but also bonds, ETFs, or other

kinds of securities. Here is probably where Dusk protocol shines the

most. In fact, by enabling compliance to be encoded, we can ensure the

integrity of transactions and entirely remove the possibility of any

violation.

You may have heard the expression “code is law”, well we made it so that

law can now be encoded.#DUSK $DUSK @Dusk