I have an old screenshot stored on my computer: an anonymous-chain transfer, with confirmations that took four minutes and fifty-two seconds. Back then I just sat there doing nothing, smoking through half a pack. That’s just my temperament—when Dusk Network said it wanted to “eat” the business of financial settlement, I was the first one who didn’t buy it.
Until I took Piecrust apart. This virtual machine was refactored in 2023 from the older Rusk, based on WASM—its speed is up by more than ten times now. It’s already been integrated into a modular architecture: DuskDS, DuskEVM, and DuskVM each handle their own part, while Piecrust remains the resident WASM virtual machine. I’ll set aside the “ten times faster” part for now. What really hooked me is the Host Functions: heavy cryptographic work is extracted from contract bytecode and offloaded into the host environment, so the contract only keeps the business logic.
The foundation also includes ZeroCaf, which runs through a Ristretto scalar field and is friendly to Bulletproofs; hashing uses Poseidon, and proofs use PlonK. The team’s open-source contributions have been forked more than 160 times, and there are currently over 600 Stars on GitHub. $ETH
I also quickly checked DUSK’s gas algorithm: it multiplies gas_used by gas_price, and even Out of Gas gets deducted without exception. That kind of “scraping the hide” actually shows the execution environment is cleanly separated—no blurry gray areas.
Now looking back at that screenshot, I find it a bit laughable, a bit ridiculous. Blowing through that half-pack of cigarettes—honestly, it wasn’t really a privacy issue. On that kind of chain, all the cryptographic burden is pushed onto the contract and the client, so being slow is basically self-inflicted. With DUSK’s Host Functions, it’s as if the heaviest work gets moved from the place it shouldn’t be to the place it should. If you put the burden on the wrong shoulders, no matter how fast the machine is, it’s still useless. #dusk $DUSK @Dusk .
Until I took Piecrust apart. This virtual machine was refactored in 2023 from the older Rusk, based on WASM—its speed is up by more than ten times now. It’s already been integrated into a modular architecture: DuskDS, DuskEVM, and DuskVM each handle their own part, while Piecrust remains the resident WASM virtual machine. I’ll set aside the “ten times faster” part for now. What really hooked me is the Host Functions: heavy cryptographic work is extracted from contract bytecode and offloaded into the host environment, so the contract only keeps the business logic.
The foundation also includes ZeroCaf, which runs through a Ristretto scalar field and is friendly to Bulletproofs; hashing uses Poseidon, and proofs use PlonK. The team’s open-source contributions have been forked more than 160 times, and there are currently over 600 Stars on GitHub. $ETH
I also quickly checked DUSK’s gas algorithm: it multiplies gas_used by gas_price, and even Out of Gas gets deducted without exception. That kind of “scraping the hide” actually shows the execution environment is cleanly separated—no blurry gray areas.
Now looking back at that screenshot, I find it a bit laughable, a bit ridiculous. Blowing through that half-pack of cigarettes—honestly, it wasn’t really a privacy issue. On that kind of chain, all the cryptographic burden is pushed onto the contract and the client, so being slow is basically self-inflicted. With DUSK’s Host Functions, it’s as if the heaviest work gets moved from the place it shouldn’t be to the place it should. If you put the burden on the wrong shoulders, no matter how fast the machine is, it’s still useless. #dusk $DUSK @Dusk .