Majority of the citizens believe in privacy chain as a
secret. Dusk Network desires something different. It is developing
infrastructure in the market that allows real trading to occur without exposing
any data that would destroy fairness. Trades in regular markets remain
confidential until the time they settle. With publicity of trades before
settlement, big traders might be picked off, little traders might be imitated
and the markets might become very unpredictable. That is what a lot of open
blockchains resemble nowadays.
After many years of development, the mainnet of Dusk was
launched on 7 January 2025, and the project positioned it as the beginning of
an open financial system in which you can never share sensitive information but
still be able to prove something when you need to. It is not the aspect of
concealing everything. The idea is to conceal the right things such as
positions, order sizes and identities and still be able to provide proofs to be
audited, rules and settlement.
This paper takes a new perspective of Dusk: market fairness.
Not privacy because privacy, but privacy as the aspect that is lacking in
making on-chain markets a first come first served game.
The actual issue: information leakage makes markets games.
In a normal public blockchain, the market information
disseminates all over. When trades are in an open mempool, individuals can
observe them, replicate them, leapfrog them or push the price in their
direction. Your plan even when you are not engaging in bad things becomes
exposed. That renders serious trading prohibitive. It also drives institutions
backward to the privacy systems.
The bet made by Dusk is straightforward: in order that you
have regulated assets and stablecoin reserves, and large trades can occur
on-chain, you must have a chain where the intention of all is not revealed by
default. Privacy in this case is not a philosophical feature. It is market
hygiene.
Two forms of transactions: open when you please, private
when you have to.
The settlement layer of Dusk maintains two types of
transactions over the same network one transparent and the other shielded.
Simply put, it implies that the chain is capable of supporting the activities
in which it is helpful to be open, and also support the activities in which it
is necessary to maintain secrecy to ensure that the markets are not biased.
The shielded model employs the zero-knowledge style proofs
to ensure that the network is still able to check the reality that funds are
legitimate and not spent twice yet still remain unaware of the sender, receiver
and the amount of money being transferred. Simultaneously, the approach of Dusk
allows managing the methods of information disclosure in the future, when they
can be demanded by a regulator, auditor, or counterparty. This evidence where
it counts is what is at the heart of the way Dusk attempts to serve finance
without transforming the chain into a surveillance machine.
It is not just fairness of traders. It's also about
validators
The second place of market manipulation is the one of people
who build blocks. The validators in most proof-of-stake systems are publicly
identifiable and are easy to attack. Provided you can find validators, you can
bully them, bribe them, censure them, or put them under observation.
The consensus system of Dusk has a leader selection concept,
which is a blind-bid: block producers place bids in a form that is not visible
during the selection process to help discourage the practice of watching or
gaming the process. This is explained in the consensus design work of Dusk
(Proof-of- Blind Bidding into their agreement process). What matters more than
the buzzwords is that Dusk attempts to make it less predictable and less
visible - predictability gives attack surfaces, so that predictability has a
detrimental effect on it.
A system that is less prone to bullying is obtained when you
combine private transactions and a consensus process whereby public targeting
is minimized. In the case of regulated finance, that is important. When markets
are pressure riddled, then they are unreliable.
Lightspeed: Ethereum-style applications, and reconciled on
Dusk.
One of the key reasons why privacy chains fall is because
the developers do not relocate. Dusk attempts to eliminate that barrier with a
Solidity-compatible execution layer (Lightspeed / DuskEVM) to allow Solidity
developers to run in the usual way, but the settlement transpires on the base
chain at Dusk.
This is important to fairness, as it allows builders to
write the apps that look normal in the market, but in balances, trade flow, and
sensitive logic, apply privacy features where they are needed. That is, Dusk
does not request the world to study an entirely new stack in order to achieve
confidential markets.
The underestimated article: official market statistics, not
guesses of the crowd.
Markets still require reliable inputs even in the case of
private execution, in particular, regulated markets. Market data and price
feeds are not ornamentation. Settlement, margin, reporting, and basic truth all
are based on them.
This is why the reason why Dusk adopted Chainlink standards
is a bigger concern than it seems. Dusk announced that it is integrating
Chainlink CCIP, and DataLink and Data Streams, namely to transfer regulated
securities on-chain using verified exchange data.
In simple words:
Dusk is telling you, you cannot trust random oracles and
vibes, to give you compliant markets. You must have official grade data pipes.
DataLink is positioned as official exchange data delivered
on-chain and Data Streams as low latency updates to trading grade applications.
It is a new axis most individuals overlook: Dusk is attempting to establish not
only personal markets, but high-integrity markets.
Bridges do not only provide access but determine the
circulation of liquidity.
Dusk regards interoperability as being fundamental to the
market. Physical assets and liquidity do not remain in one chain. Ecosystems
spread their capital and users and strategies.
Therefore, the key to Dusk lies in the cross-chain
interoperability. We will also endeavor to ensure the portability of assets
using CCIP-style messaging and standards without forming risky and improvised
bridges. In practice, Dusk has the ability to be a secret settlement node and
other chains can provide different sources of liquidity and applications.
It is a solid institutional story: Find a place to settle,
to be safe and obedient; make a connection where there already is capital.
Hyperstaking: transforming staking to programmable finance.
One more insidious change of infrastructure is
hyperstaking-stake abstraction. Instead of human beings performing the process
of staking manually, smart contracts can perform the process of staking,
unstaking, and reward routing automatically.
The utilities of practice are automated staking pools,
liquid staking models, and turnkey yield solutions which serve as real
financial infrastructure, not hobbyist. Dusk has core building blocks, despite
not being about staking, automation, rules, and predictable behavior.
Institutions should have stable systems and not the ad hoc
click and hope solutions.
Why this matters now
Dusk holds the view that public chains fail in the markets
not due to openness, but that of being too transparent. The market becomes an
extraction machine of strategies when all the actions can be seen in advance
when they are made. Dusk maintains confidentiality when it is necessary and
gives any proofs when it is required by law and trust.
The introduction of the 2025 mainnet provided the
groundwork. New elements, such as EVM compatibility, official data rails based
on Chainlink standards and strong interoperability position, make Dusk more
closely resemble a scalable finance platform.
Conclusion
One should not consider Dusk as a privacy coin with a new
set of features, but a chain that recreates the market structure on on-chain
finance. It conceals what should not be disclosed to ensure the fairness of the
market, it gives evidence where it is stipulated according to the law, it does
not depend on weak bridges with the rest of the crypto environment.
Dusk will bring more than just private transactions in case
it is successful. What will be found is the creation of markets, which are
functioning in a way similar to real markets: where information is not being
weaponised on a daily basis, and the ability to comply is not being added after
the damage has been done.
