Institutional Onboarding Without Building a Honeypot
The quiet blocker for institutional DeFi isn’t yield or liquidity. It’s onboarding. Every serious platform runs into the same question: how do you restrict access to eligible participants without turning the protocol into a database? Centralized KYC vendors solve the check, but they also create a honeypot of personal data and a single point of failure.
Dusk’s approach with Citadel is a practical way to get past that stalemate. Citadel is described as a self-sovereign identity system where a user can prove specific attributes—like meeting an age threshold or being in a permitted jurisdiction—without revealing the exact underlying information. That sounds abstract until you map it to workflows. A market can require eligibility proofs at the edge, while the chain only sees cryptographic evidence that policy was satisfied.
This is where confidentiality becomes more than privacy theater. If identities and balances aren’t automatically exposed, participants can interact without broadcasting their whole profile. And when disclosures are selective, an auditor can receive what they need without converting the public chain into a permanent dossier. Accountability stays possible, but the blast radius of sensitive data gets smaller.
