The DuskEVM developer experience at dusk— I ran through it and found the toolchain is still broken
It’s been half a year since the DuskEVM mainnet went live. The official line has always been: “Solidity developers can deploy seamlessly.” I decided to try it myself and see what level of developer experience this chain really delivers.
The documentation is fairly complete, but after finishing the tutorial, I started looking for familiar things. In the wallet list, there are no commonly used plugin wallets—how do you connect with MetaMask? I searched for a long time and found something like “Configure custom RPC,” but after filling it in, the DUSK balance doesn’t show up in the wallet. I asked around in the community, and someone replied, “Use the CLI wallet.” I went silent. In 2026, for an L1 chain, I have to open the command line just to check a balance. @Dusk
Next is the block explorer. Ethereum has Etherscan—almost every transaction’s status, logs, and token transfers can be tracked. Dusk’s explorer can also show things, but many fields display “pending parsing.” I want to see the actual gas consumption of a Hedger transaction, but I can’t find it. I also want to know whether private data from internal contract calls successfully made it on-chain, but there’s no way to view that either. The tools available to developers are still a half-finished set. The debugging toolchain is weaker too: after a contract error, reproducing it requires manually constructing and replaying the transaction—there’s no ready-made development network, no stable testnet faucet version, and no one-click simulation execution.
These aren’t “higher-level features.” They’re the minimum prerequisites for developers to work normally on a chain. Dusk has put a lot of effort into privacy and compliance, but the tooling issues that developers face every day end up being the biggest time sink. A smart contract developer steps into Dusk and discovers its privacy protection is better than most chains—but also finds that a task that’s simple elsewhere has to be broken into three steps here.
This isn’t a problem with the technical roadmap. It’s a question of developer-experience priorities. Only when I can see my DUSK balance directly in my wallet, find complete transaction logs in the explorer, and reproduce the contract execution process in the debugging tools, will I feel like this chain is truly ready. Until then, it’s still a chain with solid tech that just needs more polishing on the developer experience.
#dusk $DUSK
It’s been half a year since the DuskEVM mainnet went live. The official line has always been: “Solidity developers can deploy seamlessly.” I decided to try it myself and see what level of developer experience this chain really delivers.
The documentation is fairly complete, but after finishing the tutorial, I started looking for familiar things. In the wallet list, there are no commonly used plugin wallets—how do you connect with MetaMask? I searched for a long time and found something like “Configure custom RPC,” but after filling it in, the DUSK balance doesn’t show up in the wallet. I asked around in the community, and someone replied, “Use the CLI wallet.” I went silent. In 2026, for an L1 chain, I have to open the command line just to check a balance. @Dusk
Next is the block explorer. Ethereum has Etherscan—almost every transaction’s status, logs, and token transfers can be tracked. Dusk’s explorer can also show things, but many fields display “pending parsing.” I want to see the actual gas consumption of a Hedger transaction, but I can’t find it. I also want to know whether private data from internal contract calls successfully made it on-chain, but there’s no way to view that either. The tools available to developers are still a half-finished set. The debugging toolchain is weaker too: after a contract error, reproducing it requires manually constructing and replaying the transaction—there’s no ready-made development network, no stable testnet faucet version, and no one-click simulation execution.
These aren’t “higher-level features.” They’re the minimum prerequisites for developers to work normally on a chain. Dusk has put a lot of effort into privacy and compliance, but the tooling issues that developers face every day end up being the biggest time sink. A smart contract developer steps into Dusk and discovers its privacy protection is better than most chains—but also finds that a task that’s simple elsewhere has to be broken into three steps here.
This isn’t a problem with the technical roadmap. It’s a question of developer-experience priorities. Only when I can see my DUSK balance directly in my wallet, find complete transaction logs in the explorer, and reproduce the contract execution process in the debugging tools, will I feel like this chain is truly ready. Until then, it’s still a chain with solid tech that just needs more polishing on the developer experience.
#dusk $DUSK
