Spent an hour digging into Dusk's contract deployment docs and kept circling back to one detail: privacy isn't the default state, it's a flag you set. Dusk ($DUSK , #dusk ,@Dusk ) markets itself as the privacy-first execution layer for regulated finance, but Piecrust, its VM, ships confidential and transparent contracts as parallel options, not confidential-first with transparency as the exception. A developer deploying without specifying confidentiality gets a fully public state by default, same as most other chains. The compliance tooling — Citadel, the ZK-identity layer — exists precisely because privacy needs to be provable and reversible for regulators, which is sound design, but it also means the "privacy-first" framing describes an available capability more than a baseline behavior. Most deployed activity I could trace still leans transparent, likely because tooling maturity and auditor familiarity favor the path of least resistance. It's a reasonable architecture for institutional finance, where selective disclosure matters more than blanket secrecy. Still, there's a gap between a chain built for privacy and a chain where privacy is what you reach for. Makes me wonder how much of "privacy-first" in this category is really about default state versus available state.