Many people complain that #dusk EVM is “going backward,” but I think this is precisely the team finally figured out one thing: compatibility isn’t a compromise—it’s cost control.
Building an entirely new execution environment may not be technically inferior to Ethereum, but the price is that every supporting facility has to be grown all over again—auditing firms have to learn a new language to produce reports, the wallet team has to rewrite signing logic, and indexing services have to be re-adapted. In the end, these costs are inevitably passed on to the organizations willing to go on-chain. And when organizations make technical choices, they often first ask whether “my existing team can get started right away,” not “how elegantly this language is designed.”
@Dusk The smart part of EVM is that it separates the execution layer from the underlying capabilities: developers still deploy contracts using the familiar tools, but if they’re willing to, they can call the underlying native secret settlement and compliance checks. It’s like giving developers an option instead of forcing a single dead-end path. Teams that have already done tokenization on Ethereum can, in theory, avoid overturning a lot of code and directly plug settlement logic into a chain that was originally designed for regulated scenarios.
But I won’t rate it higher just because of this design. Adding another compatibility layer also adds another set of trust assumptions. In areas like cross-layer communication and state synchronization, historical incidents have been no less than contract vulnerabilities. The more realistic risk is that if most developers simply port old projects over unchanged—just to take advantage of the convenience of the EVM ecosystem—then the truly differentiated capability, secret settlement, will be left by the wayside, and $DUSK EVM won’t be much different from a regular EVM sidechain.
So I don’t care too much about the lively contract-deployment numbers. What I want to know is: among these contracts, how many truly make use of the native privacy and compliance modules. If that proportion can’t rise, then the differentiation story DuskEVM tells is only an option—not a reality.
Building an entirely new execution environment may not be technically inferior to Ethereum, but the price is that every supporting facility has to be grown all over again—auditing firms have to learn a new language to produce reports, the wallet team has to rewrite signing logic, and indexing services have to be re-adapted. In the end, these costs are inevitably passed on to the organizations willing to go on-chain. And when organizations make technical choices, they often first ask whether “my existing team can get started right away,” not “how elegantly this language is designed.”
@Dusk The smart part of EVM is that it separates the execution layer from the underlying capabilities: developers still deploy contracts using the familiar tools, but if they’re willing to, they can call the underlying native secret settlement and compliance checks. It’s like giving developers an option instead of forcing a single dead-end path. Teams that have already done tokenization on Ethereum can, in theory, avoid overturning a lot of code and directly plug settlement logic into a chain that was originally designed for regulated scenarios.
But I won’t rate it higher just because of this design. Adding another compatibility layer also adds another set of trust assumptions. In areas like cross-layer communication and state synchronization, historical incidents have been no less than contract vulnerabilities. The more realistic risk is that if most developers simply port old projects over unchanged—just to take advantage of the convenience of the EVM ecosystem—then the truly differentiated capability, secret settlement, will be left by the wayside, and $DUSK EVM won’t be much different from a regular EVM sidechain.
So I don’t care too much about the lively contract-deployment numbers. What I want to know is: among these contracts, how many truly make use of the native privacy and compliance modules. If that proportion can’t rise, then the differentiation story DuskEVM tells is only an option—not a reality.