A public blockchain creates an awkward situation for financial markets: transparency is useful, but too much transparency can reveal the strategy of the person trading.

Consider an order book.

If every order, position, and balance is openly visible, market participants can potentially infer trading intentions before a transaction is completed. For some financial products, that is not a minor inconvenience. It can directly affect execution quality.

This is why I find Dusk's approach to confidential EVM workflows more interesting than generic “private blockchain” language.

Hedger is designed to support privacy inside the EVM environment using homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs. One potential application is confidential order book activity, where senstive information does not have to become completely public simply because the market moved onchain.

The economic question is what this changes for market design.

If financial applications can preserve sensitive information while still proving that transactions follow the required rules, developers get another design option. They are no longer forced into the binary choice of putting everything in public view or moving the entire workflow offchain.

I would measure progress through actual market mechanics:

• Number of confidential transactions processed.
• Number of applications using privacy-preserving execution.
• Growth in activity involving financial asets rather than test transactions.

Those are more useful than counting mentions.

There is also an obvious limitation. Cryptographic privacy does not automatically create a functioning market. Liquidity, legal structure, counterparties, custody, and product design still matter.

But the orderbook problem is real.

If Dusk can make sensitive financial activity programmable without making it invisible to authorized oversight, that is a much more specific proposition than simply saying blockchain needs privacy.
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