Recently I’ve been going through the execution-layer documentation for @Dusk . In fact, the content on Rusk VM is more worth talking about than Phoenix and XSC, because no matter how pretty the protocol looks, whether it runs fast enough ultimately depends on the virtual machine.
Dusk Network is a privacy Layer-1 that serves financial applications. The execution of confidential smart contracts (XSC) requires a large number of zero-knowledge proofs, and generating and verifying ZK circuits is computationally very expensive. The original goal of the Rusk VM design is to create a zk-friendly execution environment, together with the PLONK proving system, so that the execution cost of confidential contracts can be brought down to a reasonable range. The direction is fine, but I’ve always been concerned about a few real-world numbers.
The first is proof generation time. When a user initiates a confidential transaction, their local device needs to generate a ZK proof. This time on a mobile device can range from a few seconds to dozens of seconds. In DeFi scenarios, users are extremely sensitive to confirmation speed. If every interaction requires waiting for the client to compute the proof, the user experience will differ noticeably from that of public chains. If this issue isn’t addressed, the day-to-day usability barrier for XSC will stay stuck there. $SPCXB
The second is the node verification burden. Although ZK verification is much cheaper than generation, if a block contains a few hundred confidential contract calls, the CPU load on validating nodes will still be significantly higher than on a regular EVM chain. This will directly affect Dusk’s TPS ceiling, as well as validators’ hardware requirements—thereby impacting decentralization.
The third is the developer toolchain. Rusk uses the Rust ecosystem, which is almost a different species compared to the Solidity world. The mental cost of writing an XSC contract is an order of magnitude higher than writing a Solidity contract. Whether the ecosystem can take off depends largely on whether developer experience can catch up. $AKE
Long-term value isn’t propped up by having a pretty architecture—it’s built by how many people truly deploy things on Rusk that actually work.
#dusk @Dusk $DUSK