Was going through Dusk’s fee model again and got stuck on a slightly awkward point. A network can settle a lot of financial value without needing an equally large amount of its native token to sit inside every transaction.

On Dusk, gas is paid in DUSK, and the fee comes from gas used multiplied by the gas price. So the size of the security being settled and the amount of DUSK required for execution are two different numbers. I kept wanting them to move together, but the protocol doesn’t really make that assumption.

That actually makes sense once I stopped looking at DUSK as a representation of the asset being settled. It is the resource used to make the network execute and secure those transactions. A large financial transfer can therefore sit on top of a relatively small amount of DUSK.

Then staking makes the picture less simple. DUSK is also what provisioners stake to participate in consensus, and transaction fees become part of block rewards alongside newly emitted DUSK. So network activity can feed into the same token through more than just gas demand.

I’m not sure I would call velocity a problem from that alone. It feels more like the wrong question might be whether settlement volume should map one-for-one to token demand. The more interesting question is how much demand has to remain tied up in gas, staking and consensus as usage scales.

I’d want to see one number on mainnet: how has DUSK spent on gas changed relative to actual transaction and settlement activity over time?

#dusk $DUSK @Dusk $HEMI $ACE