In recent days, news that Xu Jiayin has been sentenced to life imprisonment has been everywhere. The assets that had been polished over and the debts that had been concealed for years have finally been uncovered. Looking at all this, I suddenly thought about how, after an on-chain transaction is completed, that global state should be placed—something that can’t be hidden too deeply, but also can’t be completely exposed at once.
I pulled Dusk back up and looked at it again. What interests me isn’t privacy itself, but how @Dusk handles the state in a transaction that’s easiest to overlook. One approach puts the balance, both parties, and the amount into a public account. Another approach locks funds into encrypted credentials; the transaction only reveals proof that the funds are sufficient and haven’t been reused, and only when an audit is truly needed does it disclose the keys for verification. The two models are very far apart, but ultimately they answer the same question: after a transaction ends, what should the overall state on the chain become.
What made me think a bit longer is that contract responsible for receiving different types of data packets. It routes each kind of input to its corresponding verification logic, then writes them all into the same unified global state, so that privacy transactions don’t get shoved into some isolated ledger. #dusk $DUSK
Following the state downward, DuskDS handles consensus, finality, and settlement; DuskVM runs the contracts close to the base layer; DuskEVM provides another compatible path; and Hedger, on top of the compatibility layer, uses homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to enable confidential transactions. When you connect it all, the truly interesting part isn’t simply hiding transactions—it’s enabling transactions with different visibility levels to still enter the same state update and settlement system. Tokens simultaneously bear gas and staking, placing execution cost and network security on the same economic layer.
For someone like me, who’s seen too many projects, the first reaction is always to frown. No matter how elegant the design is, it has to be able to keep what needs to be hidden hidden in real financial scenarios, and what needs to be verified verifiable—ultimately, whether the resulting final state is sufficiently deterministic to be usable. Sometimes I feel like I’m overthinking it, but seeing the consequences of a traditional ledger being glossed over makes me look a little longer. $BTC
I pulled Dusk back up and looked at it again. What interests me isn’t privacy itself, but how @Dusk handles the state in a transaction that’s easiest to overlook. One approach puts the balance, both parties, and the amount into a public account. Another approach locks funds into encrypted credentials; the transaction only reveals proof that the funds are sufficient and haven’t been reused, and only when an audit is truly needed does it disclose the keys for verification. The two models are very far apart, but ultimately they answer the same question: after a transaction ends, what should the overall state on the chain become.
What made me think a bit longer is that contract responsible for receiving different types of data packets. It routes each kind of input to its corresponding verification logic, then writes them all into the same unified global state, so that privacy transactions don’t get shoved into some isolated ledger. #dusk $DUSK
Following the state downward, DuskDS handles consensus, finality, and settlement; DuskVM runs the contracts close to the base layer; DuskEVM provides another compatible path; and Hedger, on top of the compatibility layer, uses homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to enable confidential transactions. When you connect it all, the truly interesting part isn’t simply hiding transactions—it’s enabling transactions with different visibility levels to still enter the same state update and settlement system. Tokens simultaneously bear gas and staking, placing execution cost and network security on the same economic layer.
For someone like me, who’s seen too many projects, the first reaction is always to frown. No matter how elegant the design is, it has to be able to keep what needs to be hidden hidden in real financial scenarios, and what needs to be verified verifiable—ultimately, whether the resulting final state is sufficiently deterministic to be usable. Sometimes I feel like I’m overthinking it, but seeing the consequences of a traditional ledger being glossed over makes me look a little longer. $BTC
