Block 22450093, May 10 2025. Someone submits a straightforward ETH-to-RATO swap on Uniswap. Position 10 in the block: 1.58 ETH going in. Position 11: another wallet buys first, same pair, paying more gas to jump the queue. Position 12: that same wallet sells right back into the pool it just pushed up. The original trader ends up with roughly 10 million fewer RATO than they should have gotten. Nobody hacked anything. The mempool simply showed everyone the trade before it settled, and someone acted on what they saw.
I keep coming back to that one block because it isn't a headline hack, it's the network doing exactly what it was built to do. Public mempool, public intent, public consequence. Call it the glass ledger problem: any institution that wants to move real size onchain is being asked to trade in a room with the lights on and the blinds torn off.
That's the wall @Dusk_Foundation is building against with Hedger, the privacy engine landing on DuskEVM. Unlike Zedger's UTXO-only design, Hedger combines homomorphic encryption with zero-knowledge proofs directly at the EVM layer, so balances, amounts and counterparties stay encrypted through execution, with selective disclosure available to whoever is actually authorized to check, an auditor, a regulator, a counterparty. Same Solidity tooling, same EVM wallets, confidential by default instead of confidential by accident.
Here's what I haven't seen answered yet. DuskEVM runs as a rollup, which means a sequencer orders transactions before they're batched to DuskDS. Encrypting the payload hides it from the public mempool that produced block 22450093, but what does the sequencer itself see before ordering, and who checks that this seat isn't just a smaller, more private version of the same problem. Encrypted for us isn't automatically encrypted for whoever holds the queue. Worth watching as DuskEVM mainnet gets closer.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
I keep coming back to that one block because it isn't a headline hack, it's the network doing exactly what it was built to do. Public mempool, public intent, public consequence. Call it the glass ledger problem: any institution that wants to move real size onchain is being asked to trade in a room with the lights on and the blinds torn off.
That's the wall @Dusk_Foundation is building against with Hedger, the privacy engine landing on DuskEVM. Unlike Zedger's UTXO-only design, Hedger combines homomorphic encryption with zero-knowledge proofs directly at the EVM layer, so balances, amounts and counterparties stay encrypted through execution, with selective disclosure available to whoever is actually authorized to check, an auditor, a regulator, a counterparty. Same Solidity tooling, same EVM wallets, confidential by default instead of confidential by accident.
Here's what I haven't seen answered yet. DuskEVM runs as a rollup, which means a sequencer orders transactions before they're batched to DuskDS. Encrypting the payload hides it from the public mempool that produced block 22450093, but what does the sequencer itself see before ordering, and who checks that this seat isn't just a smaller, more private version of the same problem. Encrypted for us isn't automatically encrypted for whoever holds the queue. Worth watching as DuskEVM mainnet gets closer.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk