Dusk Network

It must be noted, that the team desires to work closely with governments in order to reach higher adoption of their technology. It is both a good point (lower risk of being not compliant with the government policy) and an additional risk for investors (to be restricted due to providing privacy opportunities). Competitors are Origo, Skrumble, Loki, Alrorang, Orchid Protocol, Polymath, Mainframe and some others. Dusk Network describes all known competitors and demonstrates good analysis. But we see not so many infrastructural solutions on the market that are upgrading privacy and anonymity. So the market is likely to be capable of all good projects existing. In addition, Dusk has some strong competitive edge - secure broadcasting/calls and STO that may be a strong point for taking the place of Ethereum. It is known that Dusk Network has a partnership with Kryha that provide well-established companies with the blockchain solution. Krysha will help in the strategy EU. We see a strong potential in the market and the Dusk Networks' positioning. 

The project offers a new consensus algorithm considered to be more efficient than PoW and PoS - Segregated Byzantine Agreement aiming to be a kind of an upgrade of the widely-known Byzantine Agreement. It adds non-operational nodes responsible for processing, voting (Varifiers and Voters) and transferring files (On-Offline File Transfer). The main nodes are only responsible for generating blocks. This structure aims to reach an optimum balance between decentralization and privacy. Regarding privacy - the team desires to work close with governments in order to reach higher adoption of their technology. Also, the team contends that every user will have to pass KYC in order to use the platform - it will allow inquiring a key to transactions history if a person is involved in the illegal activity. But privacy is still will be protected - stealth addresses and anonymous transactions (Monero-like Ring CT) will be allowed with encrypted IP-addresses. Anonymous and secure data/files transferring will be developed thanks to Secure Tunnel Switching that finds and selects the optimum secure connection. It will allow private and secure audio and video calls with confidential file transferring. One of the most distinguished features is the infrastructure that will allow issuing Security Tokens - they will be totally compliant with government regulations thanks to the built-in KYC. Roadmap is clear: Q4 2018 - Wallet, Q1 2019 - Anonymous Gossip Network, Security Token Standart, Testnet, Q2 2019 - Mainnet, Secure Tunnel Switching. Such a roadmap loos well optimized considering the complicated tech part. Currently there is no prototype available yet.

Dusk Network token will be distributed when mainnet launches - Q2 2019. It will be accepted for any activity in the network - payment for the connection, node rewards. This model is quite standard and proved its effectiveness in many blockchains.

Dusk Network aims to raise 7.8M USD for 50% of tokens - it results in total token pool valuation of 15.6M USD. It may be considered as low enough in comparison to other infrastructural projects. Only private sale is currently available, and the team did not announce plans for public sale. closely investment is 100 ETH. Max discount for is 30% for advisors and 20% for strategic investors. Purchased tokens are unlocked 25% monthly with the final bonus tokens lock up in the next month. It must be also noted that the biggest part of competitors demonstrated high ROI with far higher caps - Skrumble, Mainframe, Polymath and etc. The project provides details of how funds raised will be used.

The team includes 16 people - 8 from the tech team and 8 from the business team. Project&tech lead has software engineering experience since 2003 working 6 years for TomTom (3 years as a team leader and 1 year as a managing engineer). Then he founded IoT startup leading it for 3 years. Currently, he is an Executive Director in the company providing blockchain services. Lead researcher has a bit more experience in software engineering (since 2000) and also has been working in TomTom for 3 years. Other tech members have both software engineering and blockchain development experience for 2-5 years. The business team is also strong and covers the main streams. They worked in Shell, Blockchain at Berkley, Rabobank, KLM, Tata. The only weak point is the lack of strong legal experts - it is crucial for the project's plans to be totally compliant with EU law.