###What is Dusk?

Dusk describes itself as a blockchain for programmable and confidential securities, powered by Zero-Knowledge proofs and novel Private PoS leader extraction-based consensus protocol. Dusk is a privacy blockchain for financial applications. It is a layer-1 blockchain that powers the Confidential Security Contract (XSC) standard, and supports native confidential smart contracts.

Dusk aims to address the requirements and needs of financial markets. Central to its design is a scalable public infrastructure, direct settlement finality of transactions, and strict data privacy.

- Direct settlement finality. A distributed Financial Market Infrastructure (dFMI) should provide clear and final settlement of transactions. On Dusk transactions are fast, take seconds to complete, and achieve immediate on-chain finality.

- Privacy. Dusk provides full user privacy and enables decentralized applications and third-parties to adhere to strict compliance requirements whilst still offering data privacy. This increases the ability to perform business processes on-chain, leading to significant cost reduction.

- Public. Users do not need the approval of a trusted authority to use the Dusk blockchain. Besides, only minimal processing power and modest IT resources to join. All users who possess the DUSK token can participate in the consensus.

###How does it work?

Through the use of a transactional model called Phoenix, Dusk focuses on bringing privacy and anonymity to both transactions and smart-contracts. Additionally, tokens deployed on Dusk can build on top of Zedger, a hybrid privacy-preserving model based on Phoenix, specifically modeled for security tokens.

The ‘Segregated Byzantine Agreement’ (SBA) consensus mechanism secures the. According to the team from Dusk, 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 (private 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 and atomic swaps, or for the deployment of 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.

Dusk was founded in 2018 and is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.