DUSK is the native coin that powers Dusk Network, a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for privacy-first financial applications. Rather than serving as a general-purpose chain, Dusk Network is designed around the real needs of capital markets, where confidentiality, compliance, and fast settlement are essential. DUSK functions as the core economic engine of the network, securing consensus, enabling transactions, supporting staking, and paying for the execution of confidential smart contracts.
At the protocol level, Dusk Network introduces the Confidential Security Contract (XSC) standard, allowing developers and institutions to deploy smart contracts that protect sensitive financial data while remaining verifiable on a public blockchain. All interactions within this environment rely on DUSK, ensuring seamless value transfer and incentive alignment across validators, builders, and users. The network’s architecture emphasizes scalable public infrastructure, direct settlement finality, and strict data privacy—features that traditional blockchains struggle to combine.
A key innovation behind DUSK’s privacy capabilities is Phoenix, a novel transactional model that brings anonymity and confidentiality to both token transfers and smart-contract execution. Phoenix enables DUSK transactions to hide amounts, participants, and contract logic while preserving correctness and auditability. This makes DUSK suitable for regulated financial use cases where transparency for validators must coexist with privacy for market participants.
Building on Phoenix, Dusk Network also supports Zedger, a hybrid privacy-preserving model developed specifically for security tokens. Assets issued on the network can leverage Zedger to meet regulatory and reporting requirements without exposing sensitive on-chain data. DUSK underpins this entire framework, acting as the settlement asset and utility coin that ties privacy, compliance, and performance together.
By focusing on confidential finance rather than speculative trends, DUSK positions itself as a foundational coin for next-generation digital markets—where institutions, issuers, and users require privacy by design, not as an optional add-on.
