Dusk Network Aims to Become a RegDeFi Ecosystem Worth $100 Billion+

Dusk Network’s first annual Duskcon was a chance to show progress to match their ambition as global privacy network for decentralized financial apps.

DuskCon, held on April 9th, was Dusk Network’s first chance to show off what they have been up to since 2018. Their goal is to become the world’s first privacy blockchain for RegDeFi applications and a decentralized financial ecosystem scaled to hundreds of billions of dollars in value. 

Despite the slightly dampened energy that seems to go along with virtual events vs. their pre-2020 counterparts, DuskNetwork’s inaugural DuskCon event was smoothly produced from a studio in Amsterdam.

Jelle Pol, Founder & Business Director of Dusk Network and Emanuele Francioni, Co-Founder of Dusk Network, gave the intro and opening remarks. Pol explained that because it is a virtual event they will set a more “uptempo” tone with nearly 20 talks in a two-hour event. 

Emanuele Francioni helped set the tone and goals of the event.

“We are incredibly excited to showcase what we've been working on for so long. So humble, excited to share with you,” Francioni said. “The cryptocurrency revolution showed us what you can do with programmable money… The whole DeFi movement created an explosion of different applications… that can be combined into new and exciting financial services,” Francioni said.

Francioni said that there had been many challenges to the ambitious vision of Dusk Network, but the greatest challenge is privacy. 

“Lack of privacy is the reason why before Dusk Network, any attempt to get the financial sector to adopt blockchain technology has failed. Without privacy, you cannot have regulatory compliance and you cannot have serious business adoption,” Francioni said. “That is the reason we created this network, and within our technological stack a first-class system is natively available to all the other components of the technological stack. It's also the reason why we are among the first to support privacy-friendly smart contracts, why it took us so long to create the stack that we've introduced… and why we are ahead of all the other projects that are rushing frantically to introduce privacy,” Francioni said.

Dusk Network’s dev team has been developing a working privacy blockchain since before 2018  with the goal of hosting enterprise-class financial apps. 

DuskCon featured speakers from ANKR, Harmony, NPEX, ZCash, Aztec Protocol, and LTO who talked about network features and specific implementation.

More News for the Future

DuskCon was timed to coincide with launch of the End-2-End Release Candidate, which the network describes as a “pre-beta” launch. Dusk describes it as a technical milestone the company had been working towards for nearly 3 years. In the coming months, more features will be rolled out for public testing by the community, in anticipation of its full-fledged mainnet release.

Dusk also introduced a new $5,000,000 grant program with a focus on privacy technology. Grants will be distributed to promising projects will further the cause of blockchain privacy on the Dusk Network. This is the first grant program of its size from a blockchain company in the Netherlands. 

Dusk Network plans to fund up to 35,000 hours of labor for Dusk Network with perhaps 100 smaller initiatives, or up to 20 larger projects. The three major goals of the grant program are:

1. Kickstarting the development of tooling and infrastructure
2. Funding new research that keeps the network future proof
3. Funding the development of high potential applications that further the mainstream adoption of the Dusk Network.

“Over the past years, we discovered that it can be quite challenging to apply for a grant as an individual. National and European funds are looking for large-scale consortiums, whilst there is much more talent needed for technology companies to grow themselves. With our grants program we are contributing towards an innovative future in FinTech and COVID recovery.” said Pascal Putman, Commercial Director.

With the Grants program, Dusk said in its release it “intends to attract additional talent to further strengthen their position in the sector. Issuing grants for research and development isn’t a new thing in the industry. Dusk points to the example of Metamask, which started with a $30k grant, and now leads their sector with millions of yearly revenue in only a few years' time. 

Dusk Network is the first blockchain company in the Netherlands issuing a grants program this size making it an ambitious effort to stimulate development on the platform.