Anyone who has truly engaged in deep development in the fields of blockchain privacy and zero-knowledge proofs will honestly acknowledge a core pain point: ZK is never about functionality feasibility, but about performance usability. No matter how exquisite the papers and whitepapers are, once it comes to actual deployment, proof generation times often take tens of seconds or even minutes, causing user experience to collapse.

Many public chains on the market claim to support zero-knowledge proofs, but in practice, they forcibly integrate circuit logic within the EVM framework. Although this approach is theoretically feasible, the actual experience is extremely strained—like using a tractor on a highway—no matter how much you press the accelerator, you can't achieve the expected efficiency.

In the past few years, very few chains have been able to handle complex privacy logic. The reason is not that cryptographic theory is still immature, but that the underlying execution environment completely cannot keep up with the demand. This is precisely why Dusk has taken a completely different engineering approach: instead of patching on top of EVM, it is better to redesign from the virtual machine layer, leading to the development of the Piecrust virtual machine.

The positioning of the Piecrust VM is very clear—it does not pursue generality, but is a dedicated execution environment for zero-knowledge computations. The importance of this design choice is often overlooked. EVM is fundamentally optimized for state determinism and reusability, and has never considered proof friendliness. Running zero-knowledge computations on EVM is like executing business logic while also bearing the huge overhead of proofs.

Dusk reverses this thinking: since the goal is privacy and verifiable computation, the execution model, instruction set, and state management design should be centered around zero-knowledge proofs from day one. The result is a seemingly counterintuitive but practically feasible performance leap—proof generation time is significantly compressed, truly turning ZK from an ideal on paper into a usable product.