Spent the afternoon poking around DuskEVM testnet, live since Aug 13, deploying a dumb little contract just to see what shows up. Dusk ($DUSK , #dusk , @Dusk ) sells itself hard on privacy — ZK everything, confidential balances, the whole pitch. So I expected to have to dig for the private stuff.
Instead the first thing you actually touch is completely plain. DuskEVM runs like any EVM chain — Solidity, Hardhat, gas paid in DUSK, balances sitting right there in the explorer. Moonlight, the account-based transaction path, is documented as literally public: non-reverted transfer events, visible receiver, visible amount, nothing hidden. Hedger — the confidential layer — is a separate alpha you opt into on top, not something baked into the default path.
Kind of a funny gap, hold up — the "privacy L1" pitch is true at the protocol level (Phoenix exists, ZK proofs exist), but what you bump into first as a builder is a fully transparent chain with privacy sitting off to the side as an extra step. Not a bad design necessarily, regulated finance probably wants that default-transparent posture anyway. Still wasn't what I pictured going in.
Makes me wonder how many people staking or building here actually touch Hedger at all, versus just running standard EVM stuff and never opting in.
Instead the first thing you actually touch is completely plain. DuskEVM runs like any EVM chain — Solidity, Hardhat, gas paid in DUSK, balances sitting right there in the explorer. Moonlight, the account-based transaction path, is documented as literally public: non-reverted transfer events, visible receiver, visible amount, nothing hidden. Hedger — the confidential layer — is a separate alpha you opt into on top, not something baked into the default path.
Kind of a funny gap, hold up — the "privacy L1" pitch is true at the protocol level (Phoenix exists, ZK proofs exist), but what you bump into first as a builder is a fully transparent chain with privacy sitting off to the side as an extra step. Not a bad design necessarily, regulated finance probably wants that default-transparent posture anyway. Still wasn't what I pictured going in.
Makes me wonder how many people staking or building here actually touch Hedger at all, versus just running standard EVM stuff and never opting in.
