#dusk $DUSK @Dusk Yesterday I was looking at my small $DUSK position and caught myself focusing on something I’d mostly ignored before: how Dusk might actually keep developers around.

The two execution environments started to make more sense to me from that angle.

DuskEVM gives teams the familiar Solidity/Ethereum route. That lowers the friction to deploy, test, and bring existing tooling into the ecosystem. But DuskVM creates a second path for developers who want Rust/WASM and closer access to Dusk’s native execution environment.

The interesting part isn’t simply having two environments.

It’s the possibility of progression.

A team could start with what it already knows, get an application running, then gradually move certain workloads toward native capabilities when there’s a real reason to do it.

That’s a different developer-retention mechanism from simply saying, “we support EVM.”

My takeaway was pretty simple:

Compatibility gets developers in. Capability gives them a reason to stay.

And I think that changes what I’d watch around @Dusk.

I’m less interested in raw contract deployment numbers than I was before. I’d rather see whether existing applications become more active, move meaningful assets, and actually use Dusk-native functionality over time.

There’s also a risk I don’t want to ignore.

Two execution environments can become two separate ecosystems. If liquidity, users, and developers get split between them, the flexibility starts looking more like fragmentation.

So for my Dusk thesis, I’m watching migration between environments, cross-environment asset flow, and sustained application activity.

That feels like a better test of retention than counting new contracts.

#dusk $DUSK
@Dusk_Foundation
$Cow
$TUT

Will 2 VMs boost retention?