I rewatched Dusk’s trading model these past two days, and I got stuck on a design that’s actually quite counterintuitive: why doesn’t it simply make all trades private?
The answer is pretty realistic.
Dusk currently splits native asset transfers into two models: Moonlight and Phoenix. In Moonlight, accounts, balances, senders, and recipients are all public. Phoenix, on the other hand, puts funds into an encrypted Note, uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify transactions, hides the amounts and transaction linkages, and—when necessary—can selectively disclose information through a viewing key.
> This isn’t a question of whether “privacy is strong enough.” In financial markets, some information can’t be hidden forever.
For ordinary transfers and partial asset-management scenarios, everything needs to be verifiable.
For institutional trading, they don’t want their holdings and amounts directly exposed on-chain.
And for regulatory audits, “can’t see anything” is absolutely unacceptable.
So Dusk didn’t take the “one-size-fits-all anonymous” route. Instead, it puts both **public settlement and private settlement** into the same underlying network.
The most interesting part, in my opinion, is the trade-off.
Everything public makes audits simple, but institutions aren’t willing to expose sensitive asset flows entirely.
Everything private makes users feel comfortable, but compliance and asset management would get stuck.
Dusk’s solution is actually quite tough: let different transactions choose how much information they need to expose.
This also explains why it keeps emphasizing regulated onchain finance, rather than just selling a story about a “privacy blockchain.” Dusk’s architecture now is itself modular—built around settlement, privacy, identity, and selective disclosure.
What I want to see more is a different question:
If you’re a real institution managing financial assets, what would you be more afraid of—on-chain information leakage, or failing to produce proof when regulators need to audit accounts? @Dusk
#dusk $DUSK
The answer is pretty realistic.
Dusk currently splits native asset transfers into two models: Moonlight and Phoenix. In Moonlight, accounts, balances, senders, and recipients are all public. Phoenix, on the other hand, puts funds into an encrypted Note, uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify transactions, hides the amounts and transaction linkages, and—when necessary—can selectively disclose information through a viewing key.
> This isn’t a question of whether “privacy is strong enough.” In financial markets, some information can’t be hidden forever.
For ordinary transfers and partial asset-management scenarios, everything needs to be verifiable.
For institutional trading, they don’t want their holdings and amounts directly exposed on-chain.
And for regulatory audits, “can’t see anything” is absolutely unacceptable.
So Dusk didn’t take the “one-size-fits-all anonymous” route. Instead, it puts both **public settlement and private settlement** into the same underlying network.
The most interesting part, in my opinion, is the trade-off.
Everything public makes audits simple, but institutions aren’t willing to expose sensitive asset flows entirely.
Everything private makes users feel comfortable, but compliance and asset management would get stuck.
Dusk’s solution is actually quite tough: let different transactions choose how much information they need to expose.
This also explains why it keeps emphasizing regulated onchain finance, rather than just selling a story about a “privacy blockchain.” Dusk’s architecture now is itself modular—built around settlement, privacy, identity, and selective disclosure.
What I want to see more is a different question:
If you’re a real institution managing financial assets, what would you be more afraid of—on-chain information leakage, or failing to produce proof when regulators need to audit accounts? @Dusk
#dusk $DUSK