Dune Network: Past, Present and Future

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Dune Network

7 min readDec 23, 2019

2019 was a roller-coaster for us. We launched Dune Network and worked hard to deliver our roadmap. But we failed in our message toward the Tezos community and in the choice of one of our partners. We learnt from our mistakes and feel now stronger than ever, peaceful and ready to start a huge 2020 year.

This year was a race from the start to the end. We went through many challenges, some of which we are responsible for, some others that were independent from us. Our decision to create Dune Network was often misunderstood, but we now understand why. Allow us to briefly elaborate on this: we are proud of our former contributions to Tezos, both on the protocol and on the tooling. Unfortunately, we reached a point of disagreement and mistrust with powerful entities in the Tezos ecosystem, as it sometimes happens in business. It was impossible for us to collaborate with them anymore. Yet, we had no grief against the Tezos community, and we warmly thank all the ones who supported us, both publicly and privately. Finally and most importantly: the entire team wishes a peaceful cohabitation :)

It was never our intention to fork a community, nor impose a binary choice. Our ambitions were only and always to work in full independence on a protocol that we contributed to bring out. We also failed in the choice of one of our partner (as it sometimes happens in business), but it is now fixed. We learnt a lesson from that, and will be even more careful in the future. That being said, we’re more than ever excited about what’s ahead and the year 2020 is going to be thrilling!

We achieved many things in six months.

On the technical side, there as a first three-month sprint during which we started a new chain, airdropped thousands of accounts, deployed a full ecosystem of validators, a block-explorer, a wallet, a hard-wallet, so that everything was ready for the launch. A second sprint then started with hardly any pause as we kept developing the ecosystem during the next three months, with Ironmin storage, no-fee contracts, baker account management, ERC20-like smart contracts, and recently the Metal browser extension. The new protocol upgrade, Babylon+, will include even more features, in particular the new Love VM engine, a new native smart contract language designed for performance and formal verification.

On the business side, we are proud to partner with The Garage for its launch in Paris, a unique place that have been created to promote and federate the blockchains ecosystem. Hope you will all, colleagues and protocols join the European blockchain hub!

We’ve been happy to physically meet with many people from various protocols, which allowed us to extend our vision and enrich our knowledge. We also met many startups there, we have been in touch with ambitious blockchain projects that will emerge in 2020. We also started our training program for developers, that will continue with a new session already opened for January.

A New Roadmap for Dune Network

In our desire, unchanged, to build a protocol focused on businesses and developers, we have thought a lot and revised the Dune roadmap to make it even more efficient, from the technical, business and tokenomics aspects.

TLDR: We want to make Dune Network a sidechain of Bitcoin, focus on interoperability, developers tooling, flexibility, efficiency. We also want to make Dune Network a base chain for many others that could use DUN to be secured and to use technical components from.

In the same spirit to always provide the best, we reached the conclusion that we could gather different strengths from cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

We decided to port Dune technology as a sidechain of Bitcoin, making DUN and BTC complementary coins. Indeed, Bitcoin remains the platform with the biggest network effect, the most robust consensus and the biggest capitalization. Yet, Bitcoin suffers from one of the most limited programming capabilities. So our goal is to bring our smart contract languages, among the most reliable ones in the blockchain ecosystem, to Bitcoin through a sidechain, allowing every Bitcoin user to move his Bitcoins to the Dune Network and program them. Imagine Bitcoin coming to the Defi world with contracts that are both safe and efficient! Indeed, we think that Bitcoin is here to last, and contributing to Bitcoin through an additional layer is one of the best ways to align the interests of the most and avoid a split of computations and forces. Thus, we will participate to the scalability of the network and to its growth. It’s the same decision that RSK took, and we think it is a reasonable one. However we think that the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and the Solidity language make Ethereum unsuitable for safe and secure programming. We will bring to Bitcoin the qualities of Love VM, the new native language of Dune, and of Michelson, the native language of Tezos. But that’s not all. On that network, all the basic blocks that we have started to create will be available using the DUN token. We will talk again about this later. [ TECHNICAL, TOKENOMICS ]
In a general manner, we think that Dune Network should be as interoperable as possible to bring its value to other networks, and collaborate to support the full blockchain ecosystem. We are already in discussions with Cosmos and Polkadot communities, and we wish to integrate with them. Of course, this does not remove anything from supporting bitcoin natively. [ TECHNICAL ]
We will keep facilitating the deployment of Private Dune Network blockchains for every developer and business to benefit from Dune security and safety, interoperability with other blockchains and council governance. We think such a feature is key to scalability and interest of businesses for blockchains. We also think that a major argument to convince developers and institutional entities is the freedom to choose between public and private blockchains, and public and private transactions. With the principle of lordship of networks, validators on Dune also validate blocks on other chains, where transaction fees are paid in DUN. All of this allows applications to access easily other networks and protocols in our vision of Dune interconnected with many other networks. [ TECHNICAL, BUSINESS, TOKENOMICS ]
Dune must also keep its flexibility. From the start, we wanted to build a corporate version of the Tezos protocol, with its own on-chain governance model. We will keep this model and improve it. We will constantly add new features when possible, and add tools to make this governance as transparent and open as possible. [ TECHNICAL, BUSINESS ]
In the same approach as Ironmin, we will keep improving the performance of the network, as much in terms of transactions throughput as in terms of storage optimization. We will also keep our focus on security and privacy, with the addition of private transactions and permissioning. [ TECHNICAL ]
We will keep developing a full SDK for Dune Network. The Liquidity Online Editor and the Metal browser extension are big steps in this direction, but we plan to provide other services, such as decentralized storage, feeds and many other ones. All these services will ease the creation and development of dApps, and the fees will be paid in DUN tokens. Adoption of Dune technology by developers is one of our highest priority. For that, we will provide programming languages in addition to Liquidity, Love and Michelson, including partial or full Solidity support, to attract Ethereum developers to play with Dune. [ TECHNICAL, BUSINESS, TOKENOMICS ]
A protocol upgrade to Babylon+ will happen mid-January. The upgrade will include a change in the economic model of Dune. In the spirit to have a network lively, up-to-date and fully secured, all the accounts above a small threshold with no delegation or not baking will have their balance progressively burnt. It is an important step towards a full implication of all our users in the network health and governance system. In the same time, we will keep our efforts to make it easy for users to access or recover their tokens, delegate them or start baking with full security. [ TECHNICAL, TOKENOMICS ]

Call for Collaborations.

We really wish to make the Dune technology a part of the wide blockchain ecosystem. We humbly want to contribute to the new world that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are bringing with energy.

Such a world cannot be built by us alone. And that’s why we wish, here, to call for collaboration and contribution. Our team has a long experience of research in computer science, and how international collaboration is one of its roots principles. Whoever you are, whether you are, an expert of Bitcoin, of Ethereum, of interoperability, of tokenomics, or of blockchains in general, we would be delighted to discuss and build with you. In the same manner, we would be delighted to harness our formal verification skills to contribute (among others topics) to cooperatively build a strong, safe and efficient ecosystem.

The future is bright, let’s build it together!