The time costs in traditional financial systems have long been taken for granted. Cross-border transfers take three days, compliance approvals can take half a month, and regulatory responses may be indefinitely delayed. These delays seem to be technical bottlenecks, but fundamentally they are necessary trade-offs made by the system to maintain stability and control risks. When blockchain emerged, it promised "second-level settlement," indeed reducing some delays, but new problems arose: transparency requires exposing privacy, while privacy sacrifices verifiability. Under this dilemma, new delays were created—waiting for privacy verification, waiting for trust to be established.

It may seem like a vicious cycle. But Dusk Network took a different approach: instead of eliminating all delays, it categorizes and handles them. Some delays are necessary and worth optimizing; others are useless friction that should be cut outright. Through a three-layer architecture, it transforms those delays caused by conflicts between transparency and privacy into controllable, predictable, and even programmable processes.

This is true progress—not barbarically speeding everything up, but intelligently managing time allocation.