$SPK (20.28%) & $MORPHO (18%)

$DUSK 3.77% #dusk @Dusk

I found myself wondering while reading Dusk's performance specs: why does a privacy-first blockchain target 1,000 transactions per second when Ethereum does 12-15 TPS?

The answer reveals something important about hidden trade-offs.
Privacy doesn't scale for free. Phoenix transactions require zero-knowledge proofs. Those proofs take time to generate, verify, and include in blocks. Dusk optimized for this, which is why throughput is higher than pure privacy chains. But here's what most analysis misses: that throughput comes with infrastructure costs.
Higher throughput means more computational burden on validators. More computational burden means fewer people can run nodes profitably. Fewer nodes means the network concentrates. Privacy supposedly creates decentralization. In practice, the scalability requirements might force centralization.

What struck me is how this inverts the decentralization narrative. Dusk claims to offer privacy plus decentralization. But supporting 1,000 TPS on a network secured by confidential smart contracts requires serious hardware. That hardware cost becomes a barrier to validator participation.
Most chains solve this through centralized sequencers or rollups that push compute off-chain. Dusk keeps everything on the base layer because settlement finality matters for institutional use. That design choice creates real throughput, but at the cost of validator accessibility.

My concern would be that Dusk's target throughput (1,000 TPS) is high enough to require industrial-grade infrastructure, but not high enough to justify the privacy cost. It's stuck between two worlds: too expensive for casual validators, too slow for high-frequency traders.

Is the throughput-to-decentralization trade-off actually reasonable, or is Dusk sacrificing practical decentralization for a specification that sounds good on paper?

Which trade-off matters more for Dusk?