Spent an hour reading through DUSK's docs looking for the thing every privacy chain claims: confidential transactions by default. $DUSK , #dusk , @Dusk . What I found instead was a fork in the road most people won't notice unless they're actually building. The base layer transaction is shielded, sure, but the moment you want composability with anything resembling a smart contract, you're routed through Piecrust and a separate confidential contract execution path that isn't the thing wallets ship with out of the box. So the "private by default" framing is technically true for transfers and quietly conditional for programmable use. One design choice stood out: the network treats privacy and auditability as a toggle at the application layer, not a network-wide guarantee — which means the actual privacy posture of anything built on DUSK depends entirely on which module a developer chose to wire in. That's not a flaw exactly, it's an architecture decision with consequences nobody markets. Makes me wonder how many "privacy-preserving" apps on top of chains like this are actually just privacy-capable, waiting on someone to turn the feature on.