When it comes to Dusk, many people's first reaction is "a public chain with stronger privacy." It sounds reasonable, but this positioning actually greatly underestimates its true ambition. Privacy indeed plays an important role in Dusk's ecosystem, but the problem is—privacy has never been the goal itself, but a prerequisite for achieving a larger objective.

Look at how real-world finance operates. It has always been a gray area. Not everything can be transparent; companies need to protect trade secrets, and asset management firms must hide fund structures. But on the other hand, regulators must be able to penetrate, audit, and conduct compliance checks. This seemingly contradictory balance is precisely the core logic that allows traditional finance to function.

Early blockchain projects took a different path. They either leaned toward complete transparency or fully anonymous systems. The result? Neither extreme could meet the needs of real-world finance because real finance requires a "both-and" approach.

This is what Dusk is working on. It doesn't stand at either extreme but instead addresses an engineering challenge—how to enable transparency and privacy to coexist on-chain. This isn't something that can be solved by simply changing the narrative; it requires starting from the protocol layer, reserving space for assets, identities, permissions, and audits. That is where the difficulty lies.