This week’s session with Moana (Software Engineer at Dusk) offered a deep dive into her background in mathematics, her work on Dusk’s cryptographic stack, and the current progress on the bridge between DuskDS and DuskEVM.
The discussion also touched on Dusk’s evolving modular architecture, the role of Hedger and STOX, and the long-term vision combining privacy with regulatory-grade infrastructure.
Breakdown of key questions and answers below 
Q1: Can you share a bit about your background and how you started your journey into software engineering and blockchain?
- Moana’s background is in mathematics, which she initially pursued out of curiosity and interest in the subject.
- While living in Amsterdam, she discovered a software engineering school that taught programming from the ground up. Starting with C language and rebuilding the C standard library from scratch.
- She immediately fell in love with the process of engineering logic into code, describing it as “building something out of nothing in the ether.”
- What hooked her most was the creative and logical interplay, designing complex systems in her head, debugging them, and finally seeing them come to life on a computer.
- She found the same excitement at Dusk, where she now applies mathematical concepts to cryptographic algorithms and zero-knowledge systems, combining theory and engineering to build real-world applications.
Q2: What was your first professional experience after learning programming, and how did you end up joining Dusk?
- Moana joined Dusk right after finishing her software engineering program.
- She’s been at Dusk for over four and a half years, contributing deeply to the project’s evolution since its early days.
- What initially drew her to Dusk was her strong interest in the Rust programming language, especially coming from C.
- Rust offered the best of both worlds: low-level power and performance with modern memory safety guarantees.
- Since most active Rust projects were (and still are) in the crypto and blockchain space, joining Dusk was a natural next step to apply her technical interests in a cutting-edge environment.
Q3: After over four years at Dusk, what have been some of your favorite projects or most memorable experiences?
- Moana has worked on nearly all of Dusk’s core cryptographic libraries, with several being completely rewritten from scratch by her.
- One of her favorite projects was the Poseidon hashing algorithm, which she described as particularly satisfying to rebuild due to its complexity and elegance.
- What makes Dusk’s work unique, she explained, is that very few existing libraries or references can be reused, most components need to be built entirely in-house, since Dusk operates at the cutting edge of blockchain cryptography.
- Even when external cryptographic implementations exist, they’re often only available in their “native” (non-ZK) form, meaning Moana and the team must design and implement zero-knowledge circuits from scratch to make them compatible with PLONK and integrate into Phoenix, Dusk’s privacy-preserving transfer protocol.
- The experience of working in such a low-level, custom-built codebase, where every layer is handcrafted for security, performance, and privacy, is one of the aspects she enjoys most about being at Dusk.
Q4: You’re currently working on the bridge between DuskDS and DuskEVM. Can you tell us more about your work and how testing is going?
- Moana is currently focused on the bridge contract, which enables fund transfers between Dusk’s Layer 1 (DuskDS) and Layer 2 (DuskEVM).
- As of the hangout, the team was actively testing the deposit flow, meaning deposits from L1 to L2 were being executed and verified in real time.
- A major challenge has been making the EVM layer correctly recognize and interact with Dusk’s custom L1, which required complex mapping and translation work.
- The bridge contract runs on Layer 1 and connects to a multisignature protection layer to safeguard sensitive functions once deployed.
- For this first iteration, the team chose a simplified, fully trusted bridge model to prioritize functionality and speed of testing.
- Moana explained that the deposit flow starts on L1, is picked up by a proxy that filters events, and relays encoded transactions to the EVM. The withdrawal flow mirrors this in reverse, using a relayer that listens on L2 and executes transactions back on L1.
- Despite the complexity, the full deposit-to-withdrawal process is now under active testing.
Q5: What has been the most challenging part of building the bridge between DuskDS and DuskEVM?
- The biggest challenge so far has been getting all the moving parts to work seamlessly together, ensuring every component properly communicates across both layers.
- The key mapping between Dusk’s cryptographic keys and EVM-compatible keys was a particularly complex issue, since Dusk uses longer key formats that required custom encoding logic.
- Beyond that, the main difficulty now lies in making the entire bridge flow (deposit and withdrawal) operate smoothly end to end, with all subsystems, contracts, proxies, and relayers, synchronized.
Q6: Are there any current plans to scale DuskVM or explore new zero-knowledge discoveries?
- Moana clarified that there’s no active development focus on DuskVM at the moment.
- The entire engineering team is currently dedicating resources to DuskEVM and to the projects being built on top of it, since bringing the EVM layer to production is the immediate priority.
- Once DuskEVM is fully deployed and operational, attention will later shift toward DuskVM as it becomes more relevant to Dusk’s stack.
- All existing DuskVM functionalities remain live and available on DuskDS for those who wish to experiment with them today.
Q7: How do the main components of Dusk’s tech stack, DuskDS, DuskEVM, Hedger, and STOX, interact with each other? Which ones are independent, and which depend on others?
- DuskDS serves as the Layer 1 foundation of the network, the base protocol responsible for settlement, consensus, and data availability. It runs independently.
- DuskEVM is a Layer 2 built on top of DuskDS, functioning as an Optimism-style rollup. It handles smart contracts and applications using standard Solidity and settles back to DuskDS.
- Hedger is Dusk’s privacy tool for the EVM. It will enable private transactions on DuskEVM, similar in spirit to Phoenix on DuskDS, though with one key difference:
- Phoenix obfuscates both sender and recipient.
- Hedger focuses on concealing transaction amounts and details, but not the sender and receiver.
- STOX is the RWA dApp, a separate project built on top of DuskEVM for the issuance and trading of tokenized securities like bonds and funds.
- STOX depends on DuskEVM being live, but not on Hedger
Q8: Looking ahead, what excites you most about Dusk’s future?
- Moana is most excited to see how DuskEVM and the ecosystem of products built on it will evolve once live.
- She also expressed pride in her work on Phoenix, calling it one of the highlights of her time at Dusk.
- Beyond the technical side, what truly inspires her is Dusk’s dual focus on privacy and regulatory compliance, something she sees as rare and unique in the blockchain space.
- She highlighted how partnerships with NPEX and other regulated entities bring this vision closer to reality.
- For Moana, this balance between innovation, compliance, and privacy is what makes Dusk special, and what she’s most excited to see take shape next.
Watch the full recording here: https://youtu.be/e3mz7d0-VEA
Have more questions? Drop them below and we’ll include them in a future session.
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