The long-standing imbalance between privacy and transparency. Blockchain has provided us with a trusted foundation for public ledgers, but the real pain points for financial institutions, enterprises, and even individuals are—how to operate on-chain without exposing transaction details and data sovereignty?

DUSK Network was born out of this need. It’s not just another public chain; its ambition is to pave the way for programmable privacy finance and truly restore user rights within a compliant framework.

**Innovative technical features**

DUSK’s killer feature is its dual-layer architecture. First, the consensus layer— they developed an SBA (Secure Byzantine Agreement), essentially an upgraded version of proof of stake. It cryptographically randomly selects block producers through encrypted lotteries, combined with anonymous staking design, ensuring validator identities are completely hidden. What’s the result? Consensus is lightning-fast (finality in just a few seconds), while also eliminating the old power monopoly model based on computing power, so financial institutions don’t have to worry about exposing their participation identities.

Looking at the privacy layer—this is where DUSK differs most from other privacy protocols. Their self-developed Phoenix transaction framework allows amounts and addresses to be fully hidden. The key is that it uses the Plonk proof system, maximizing performance and security. In other words, you can perform complete financial operations on-chain without others being able to tell what you’re doing.