I kept staring at Dusk's transaction explorer trying to figure out why confirmed activity looked so much thinner than the confidential-compute pitch decks implied. ($DUSK #Dusk @Dusk ) gets framed as regulated-market infrastructure, the whole zero-knowledge-for-securities angle, but the part that actually stopped me was the gap between "privacy-preserving settlement" as a design goal and what privacy-preserving settlement looks like when almost nobody is settling yet. The Piecrust VM and Phoenix transaction model are built for a world where institutional-grade confidentiality matters at scale, shielded balances, selective disclosure, compliance hooks baked into the proving system itself. That's a real engineering choice, not vaporware. But right now the chain's usage pattern is mostly testnet-era behavior, wallets cycling small amounts, validators processing traffic that doesn't resemble the regulated-market flow the architecture was designed around. It's infrastructure built ahead of its own demand curve, which is either patient long-term thinking or a mismatch nobody wants to say out loud yet. What I keep coming back to is that most L1s optimize for the users they already have. Dusk seems to be optimizing for users who don't exist on-chain yet, tokenized securities issuers, regulated funds, entities that move slowly by design. Whether that patience gets rewarded or just sits there unused is the actual open question.