Something about Dusk Network keeps nagging at me. It's not really building a way to hide transactions from everyone — it's building a way to hide them from everyone except the one party who's legally owed a look. That's a much harder problem than the usual privacy chain pitch, and it's the kind of narrow problem that quietly hides most of the risk.
Because here's the truth: institutions don't show up because a system is elegant. They show up because someone whose license is on the line decides to trust it. So the real test for something like Zedger isn't whether the math checks out. It's whether an issuer ever actually feels okay replacing a compliance officer with a proof. That's a slow, very human decision, not a cryptographic one.
There's also a tradeoff I don't see people sit with enough — reconciling privacy and compliance almost always means somebody still holds a disclosure key. Which brings the trusted party right back in, just wearing different clothes.
And the incentives cut both ways. Validators are securing a network whose customers move at institutional speed, while emissions quietly cover the gap. Fine for now. But eventually that's a loan against adoption that hasn't arrived yet.