Speaking of Dusk, this project that started back in 2018, its positioning sounds quite ambitious — to build a bridge between traditional finance and the decentralized world. How to build it? Rely on privacy and compliance through technological stacking.

Honestly, this approach does hit many pain points. Take privacy coins like Zcash and Monero; their anonymity capabilities are strong, but the problems are obvious — regulators see them as black boxes and just pass. Conversely, public chains like Ethereum are fully transparent, with financial data accessible at will, posing significant risks of sensitive information leakage. Dusk’s compromise is to develop a privacy engine called Hedger, whose core logic is "you decide the privacy granularity."

What does that mean? For example, in securities trading, you can choose to hide the transaction amount but reveal the trading parties and compliance proofs to regulators. This way, financial institutions can protect sensitive data without worrying about regulatory issues. From an application scenario perspective, it’s indeed a clever compromise.

In terms of transaction speed, Dusk’s Succinct Attestation consensus protocol can confirm transactions within a few seconds, and once on the chain, transactions are irreversible. This metric is competitive for high-certainty scenarios like traditional securities trading and cross-border payments, demonstrating solid performance.

But these technical advantages are just superficial. Where are the real problems? Commercialization, technological iteration, and ecosystem development — all are still in exploratory stages, far from large-scale production applications. In other words, the difficulties Dusk faces are actually the hard bones that all blockchain projects in the financial sector are trying to chew through.