Every market I've ever trusted had one thing in common: I could see the price — the last trade, roughly where things stood. That shared number is what lets people value what they hold, mark a portfolio, price collateral, and judge whether a quote is fair. Price discovery is a public good a market produces just by being watchable.
Confidentiality goes straight at that. If trades and positions are hidden, the market stops broadcasting the signal everyone leans on. You protect the individual and quietly starve the group. How do you mark a bond you can't see trade? How does a lender value collateral it can't price?
That's the tension buried in "confidential regulated market": the same opacity that stops competitors front-running your book also removes the reference price the market needs to function — and to be trusted.
Where Dusk's design could help is the middle path — selective disclosure and aggregation. Publish enough (a delayed print, aggregate volume, a reference price) for discovery and oversight, without exposing who traded what. Confidential participants, public-enough prices.
But that dial is hard. Too aggregated or delayed and discovery is poor — wide spreads, stale marks, room to manipulate in the dark. Too granular and you re-expose the people you were shielding.
Who cares: anyone who must value, mark, or lend against these assets. What makes it fail: treating confidentiality as free — forgetting a market with no visible price isn't private, it's opaque, which is what regulators trust least.