The Quiet Beginning That Shaped Dusk

Back in 2018, when most crypto teams were racing to launch tokens and grab attention, a small group took a very different path. Emanuele Francioni, a robotics expert with a deep technical background, joined forces with Fulvio Venturelli, who came from the investment side, and business strategist Jelle Pol. They were not trying to build another general-purpose blockchain. They were trying to fix a problem everyone was ignoring.

Public blockchains like Ethereum were powerful, but they were built on full transparency. That works for simple transfers, but it breaks down when you want to trade securities or handle financial instruments that require confidentiality. On the other side were private blockchains such as Hyperledger. They offered privacy, but they lived in closed ecosystems, cut off from real liquidity and the broader crypto economy.

The founders saw this split as a structural flaw in the market. Either you had openness with no privacy, or privacy with no real market depth. Dusk was born to sit in the middle of those two extremes and remove that trade-off.

In 2018 the team secured around 8.1 million dollars in funding, with backing from names like Bitfinex, Maven 11, and Blockwall. At the time, the industry was still echoing the excess of the ICO era, where speed mattered more than substance. Dusk refused to play that game. Instead of rushing to release half-finished products, they chose to disappear into research.

This decision shaped the project’s identity. As the market slid into the long crypto winter, many teams folded or pivoted. Dusk stayed focused, channeling its resources into cryptographic work, especially in zero-knowledge systems that were still experimental at the time. There were no shortcuts, no loud promises, just steady progress on the foundations needed for confidential finance on open networks.

That early restraint is why Dusk looks the way it does today. It was not built in the heat of speculation, but in a period when only serious builders stayed in the room.

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