#dusk $DUSK When I reviewed the gas-fee market on the Dusk network, I found that it isn’t like Ethereum’s plain-sight, one-way sealed-bid competition. Instead, it’s a “two-sided game” played between users, nodes, and smart contracts. In Dusk’s model, users can choose to pay higher gas to speed up execution, but nodes also have the right to decide—based on the complexity of the transaction execution—whether to prioritize those transactions with better “value for money.”
This leads to a counterintuitive outcome: a payment with high gas fees but simple logic, and a liquidation with a medium gas fee but a complex contract call—the latter may be prioritized by nodes. That’s because when nodes calculate profit, they subtract CPU and memory consumption; even if complex transactions have higher rates, their net profit may still be lower than that of simpler transactions with lower rates but higher profitability. Your “raise the bid” instruction doesn’t always work against the node’s own economic algorithm.
It’s like hailing a taxi: you pay a high price, but the driver sees the destination is a remote mountainous area, and the return trip would be an empty ride. They might prefer a slightly lower-priced job with an easier route. Dusk hands part of this choice over to the nodes. The original intent is to optimize network resource allocation and prevent inefficient contract calls from congesting the network. But the side effect is that transaction priority becomes a black box for ordinary users. You can no longer ensure priority simply by paying more.
To keep track of this, I’ll monitor snapshots of Dusk’s mempool and analyze the packaging rate across different gas prices and transaction types. If, for certain specific contract types, even paying far above the average gas still results in a notably high packaging delay, that would indicate that the nodes’ “profitability bias” has overwhelmed user instructions. This will affect how #dusk values time-sensitive transactions—such as oracle quotes and liquidations—because pricing won’t be as straightforward as “highest bidder wins.”
#dusk @Dusk $DUSK