Recently, the market has been so dizzying, with memes flying everywhere. I wasn't really in the mood to look at the technical aspects, but a couple of days ago, while scrolling through new commits on Layer 1 on GitHub, I accidentally stumbled upon a few updates from Dusk. To be honest, my initial impression of this project had lingered in the phase of 'forever in the testnet' from a few years ago, and I had even mentally tossed it into the 'dead chain' trash bin. However, this time, as I patiently went through their latest Piecrust virtual machine documentation and the code for the mainnet consensus mechanism, I felt a slight chill of cold sweat behind me. Not from fear, but from excitement. Because I discovered that these Dutch folks are working on ZK (zero-knowledge proofs) not to allow us to anonymously buy meme coins on the chain, but to actually pave a highway capable of handling heavy armored vehicles for those traditional finance old-timers.
Let's set aside the coin price for now and purely complain about the aesthetic of the current privacy track from a technical architecture perspective. Look at today's Ethereum Layer 2; the so-called privacy is mostly still just patching on EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). The EVM was not designed with privacy computation in mind from the beginning; trying to run zero-knowledge proofs on it feels like trying to attach a Boeing 747 engine to a tractor; not only are the gas fees ridiculously expensive, but generating a proof also takes forever. When I look at Dusk's Piecrust virtual machine, my most intuitive feeling is that this thing has a bit of 'cleanliness obsession'. It is based on WASM and has taken memory management to the extreme, which is a lifesaving optimization for generating ZK proofs locally on the client side. If you have tried running the proof generation process for Tornado Cash on a web page, you know what I'm talking about: the CPU fan goes crazy, the browser freezes, and the experience is extremely poor. But Dusk's architecture seems to intentionally address this issue; it digests a lot of computational load through optimized instruction sets. Although this kind of underlying reconstruction takes a long development cycle that makes people want to curse, the result is indeed much more solid than those 'shell' public chains.
This inevitably brings up its competitors. Let's look at Secret Network, which uses TEE (Trusted Execution Environment), in simple terms, relying on Intel's hardware SGX. Not to mention that Intel's chips have been exposed to side-channel attack vulnerabilities from time to time; purely from a decentralization belief perspective, placing privacy in the hands of hardware manufacturers is simply absurd. Mina is indeed lightweight; a blockchain size of 22KB sounds very appealing, but the programming model of zkApp is too unfamiliar for developers accustomed to Solidity, and the ecological migration cost is extremely high. Dusk's handling here is rather cunning; it created a DuskEVM, which superficially is compatible with the Ethereum toolchain, but underneath, it's running Piecrust. This means that developers can write code with familiar tools, but the underlying system is a privacy-optimized virtual machine. However, I must pour a bucket of cold water here; compatibility has always been a double-edged sword, often sacrificing some native performance for the sake of compatibility. During my interactions on the testnet, I occasionally still felt that the transaction confirmation delays were not as smooth as the white paper claimed, especially during high concurrency, the 'instant finality' was somewhat discounted.
Speaking of 'instant finality', this might be the pain point I most want to discuss in this research. Have you ever thought about why RWA (Real World Assets) has been shouted about for so many years, except for the tokenization of US Treasury bonds, other stocks and real estate on-chain have always been stalled? Besides regulatory reasons, the biggest technical obstacle is 'rollback'. If you buy a share of Apple stock on-chain and then the blockchain forks, resulting in a transaction rollback, this is an absolute level one incident in traditional financial markets. Dusk's Succinct Attestation consensus mechanism, from what I see in the code logic, is determined to solve this problem. Once a block is finalized, it is mathematically certain and absolutely irreversible. This design is clearly aimed at pleasing those involved in stock exchanges. I see their cooperation with NPEX, and the logic is right here. What NPEX needs is not how high the TPS is, but once this transaction is finalized, even the king himself cannot change it, while also keeping outsiders from seeing who bought this order.
This touches on Dusk's core narrative contradiction — the game between compliance and privacy. In the crypto circle, 'privacy' originally meant resistance to censorship, meaning I could donate to Hamas and no one could stop me. But Dusk's privacy is 'controlled privacy'. Its Phoenix and Moonlight transaction models are practically handing a cigarette to regulators. Look at its logic: I can protect your trading strategies from being seen by opponents (to prevent front-running), but I must leave a backdoor (or an auditing channel) for regulators to prove your funds are legally sourced. This kind of 'sitting on the fence' approach will definitely be criticized by extreme libertarians, who see it as a betrayal of blockchain. But I think conversely, if Web3 really wants to embrace those trillions of traditional financial assets, this kind of compromise might be the only solution. Are you expecting BlackRock to use Monero? That's impossible.
I also tried running one of their nodes. To be honest, the threshold is not low. Unlike some public chains where you can run with a home desktop, Dusk's nodes have strict resource requirements due to participation in the generation and verification of zero-knowledge proofs. This actually brings a hidden danger, which is the trend towards centralization of nodes. If only large servers from professional institutions can run full nodes, is this still the decentralized network we want? Although the official claims to be optimizing, the current hardware threshold has indeed discouraged many retail investors who want to 'mine' at home. Moreover, I see the active node data on the browser, and most are still concentrated in Europe, which relates to the project's geographical attributes but also exposes the inadequacy of global promotion.
Let's talk about that love-hate relationship with the Citadel protocol. This thing is Dusk's identity layer, claiming to achieve 'KYC without leaking privacy'. This hits my pain point. Every time I participate in an IDO, I have to upload my passport and a selfie, and then a couple of days later, I get scam calls; this experience is really enough. The logic of Citadel is that I only need to do KYC once at a trusted institution, and then generate a zero-knowledge proof on-chain. In the future, whenever I go to any DeFi protocol, I just need to present this proof, and the contract will know 'this guy is an adult, not a terrorist, not on any blacklist', but has no idea whether I am Zhang San or Li Si. This sounds perfect, but how about the implementation? So far, I haven't seen many real applications integrating Citadel in the ecosystem; most DApps still use the traditional wallet connection model. It's like building a high-tech gate with facial recognition, but everyone is still accustomed to climbing over the wall to get in. If the advancement of technology cannot translate into a change in user habits, then it's just self-indulgence.
Moreover, Dusk's documentation is really quite obscure. As someone who somewhat understands code, I find myself looking up materials for a long time when reading their technical yellow paper; for ordinary developers, this threshold is like a wall. Although there are grant incentives, if developers can't even figure out the environment configuration, then those 15 million coins of incentives won't be distributed. What I worry about the most is that it becomes a 'ghost town' — technically impressive but with only dozens of daily active users on-chain. Right now, the TPS data in the browser is consistently in single digits; although the mainnet has only recently launched, this level of quietness still makes people uneasy.
However, from an investment logic perspective, this kind of 'quietness' might just be an opportunity. The current market hotspots are all about AI and memes, while privacy and RWA are in forgotten corners. Dusk's market cap indeed shows a mismatch compared to its six years of development accumulation. I look at the K-line chart; this coin moves very independently. When Bitcoin drops, sometimes it not only doesn't drop but inexplicably spikes, indicating that there are strong manipulators controlling the market, or that most of the chips are in the hands of long-term stakers, and liquidity is not as rampant as it seems. This structure often has strong explosive potential in the mid-bull market because it can drive the market without needing too much capital.
But I must remind you, do not treat Dusk as a general-purpose public chain like Ethereum. It is a special forces soldier, specifically doing the one thing of 'regulatory assets on-chain'. If in the next two years, the RWA track doesn't have a major outbreak, or if regulatory agencies suddenly go crazy and say 'even zero-knowledge proofs we don't recognize, must be explicitly regulated', then Dusk's underlying logic will collapse. This thing is like an expensive option, betting on that moment when traditional finance embraces blockchain.
Recently, I've been lurking in the community and found that what developers discuss the most is not the coin price, but how to write more efficient circuits on Piecrust. This technical atmosphere is quite rare in today's restless circles. Although the progress is as slow as a snail and often criticized by the community as the 'eternal pigeon king', each step is indeed steady. For those of us who want to lay low in the race, this kind of team that can still focus on writing code during garbage time is probably what we need. After all, when the tide goes out, only those who are wearing pants can stand on the shore, and Dusk is not only wearing pants but also a set of compliant bulletproof vests.
