When I read Dusk’s development documentation this time, what truly made me stop wasn’t the privacy feature, but why it doesn’t simply just do EVM.
Now Dusk keeps both DuskVM and DuskEVM: the former runs directly on Dusk L1 and is aimed at Rust/WASM contracts; the latter provides Solidity, Vyper, and familiar EVM toolchains. The official answer to developers is actually very straightforward: these two paths don’t solve the same problem.
> This may look like duplicated construction, but in reality it’s trading “developer convenience” for “native capability.”
From the perspective of a typical EVM developer, DuskEVM is clearly the easier choice. Wallets, languages, and toolchains are all more familiar, migration costs are lower, and teams don’t need to relearn an entirely new and unfamiliar development approach.
But if an application needs to directly interact with Dusk’s native assets, privacy capabilities, zero-knowledge logic, or an execution environment that’s closer to L1, then DuskVM has its value. The official documentation clearly distinguishes these two paths instead of forcing all applications to take only one route.
That’s where the problem lies.
Two execution environments mean higher complexity in development and maintenance, and the ecosystem tools can’t be completely unified either.
But if you only care about EVM compatibility, Dusk might end up locking its most special capabilities inside a more general execution framework.
Lately, I’ve been increasingly convinced that what Dusk is really betting on isn’t “whether it will be compatible with Ethereum,” but:
**Whether it can let developers come in using familiar things first, and when they truly need native capabilities, they’ll be willing to take the learning cost of another execution environment.**
If you’re a developer, would you choose to go live faster with the more familiar EVM, or would you be willing to take on the learning cost of a new execution environment for privacy and native capabilities?@Dusk
#dusk $DUSK
Now Dusk keeps both DuskVM and DuskEVM: the former runs directly on Dusk L1 and is aimed at Rust/WASM contracts; the latter provides Solidity, Vyper, and familiar EVM toolchains. The official answer to developers is actually very straightforward: these two paths don’t solve the same problem.
> This may look like duplicated construction, but in reality it’s trading “developer convenience” for “native capability.”
From the perspective of a typical EVM developer, DuskEVM is clearly the easier choice. Wallets, languages, and toolchains are all more familiar, migration costs are lower, and teams don’t need to relearn an entirely new and unfamiliar development approach.
But if an application needs to directly interact with Dusk’s native assets, privacy capabilities, zero-knowledge logic, or an execution environment that’s closer to L1, then DuskVM has its value. The official documentation clearly distinguishes these two paths instead of forcing all applications to take only one route.
That’s where the problem lies.
Two execution environments mean higher complexity in development and maintenance, and the ecosystem tools can’t be completely unified either.
But if you only care about EVM compatibility, Dusk might end up locking its most special capabilities inside a more general execution framework.
Lately, I’ve been increasingly convinced that what Dusk is really betting on isn’t “whether it will be compatible with Ethereum,” but:
**Whether it can let developers come in using familiar things first, and when they truly need native capabilities, they’ll be willing to take the learning cost of another execution environment.**
If you’re a developer, would you choose to go live faster with the more familiar EVM, or would you be willing to take on the learning cost of a new execution environment for privacy and native capabilities?@Dusk
#dusk $DUSK