Market Hygiene Beats Radical Transparency
DeFi learned the hard way that radical transparency is not the same thing as trust. When every balance, trade, and collateral position is broadcast to the whole internet, it invites front-running, copycat strategies, and a level of surveillance that most people never agreed to. Institutions feel it even more: if a treasury desk moves size on-chain, the market can see it before the desk can hedge, and compliance teams inherit a permanent data spill they can’t undo. Privacy in finance isn’t a luxury feature. It’s basic market hygiene.
What interests me about Dusk as a Layer 1 is the way it treats confidentiality as infrastructure, not an add-on. The goal isn’t to hide from rules. It’s to make room for rules without forcing every participant to leak their entire financial life. Dusk talks about proving compliance conditions without exposing personal or transactional details. That’s a subtle shift, but it changes how you design protocols. You can build markets where users keep confidential balances and transfers, while still enabling the checks that regulated players need. Public settlement, private intent, and just enough disclosure to keep everyone honest is a healthier baseline than either total opacity or total exposure.
