The privacy is usually added to most blockchains post-factum. Dusk begins by making an assumption that data leakage is a bug. Only one assumption is made to change the whole stack.
The defining innovation of Dusk is that it is not a system that involves zero-knowledge proofs, but a financial execution system in which confidentiality is the default system. It is provable that the state can change without revealing state. Practically, the ownership of assets, transfer logic, and compliance conditions are enclosed in cryptographic commitments rather than public ledgers.
In contrast to DeFi-centric chains where smart contracts are open by default, the smart contract model of Dusk is made to support confidential state machines. Rules (who may hold, transfer, or settle an asset) can be enforced by contracts without the participants or values being known. This is essential to securities, in which only regulators are legally entitled to transparency: markets are not.
This philosophy has been strengthened by the consensus layer. Deterministic finality is valued over probabilistic settlement, which is fast. This is not accidental. Financial instruments cannot have legal finality, and they are not likely finality after N blocks. Dusk does not regard the blockchain as a casino, but a settlement engine.
The other aspect that has not been given much consideration is the identity position adopted by Dusk. Dusk also supports cryptographic credentials, which are statements that you are authorized to do, but not who you are, instead of on-chain identities or off-chain KYC silos. This changes compliance to identity exposure to capability verification, which is a much more scalable model.
Dusk is not competing with Ethereum, Solana or L2s on volume. It is also addressing a more specific, more difficult issue: small steps towards on-chain operation of capital markets, without violating their own policies. It is less evident in the hype cycles, but it may be more resilient.
The actual gamble of Dusk Foundation is unobtrusive: in case controlled finance has ever been migrated on-chain, it will select systems that leak least information, not most. Privacy will not be an option in that future, it will be infrastructure.
