Open source code is the foundational belief of blockchain and a necessary condition for building trustless systems. But when this principle encounters privacy-focused public chains like Dusk in the financial sector, the issues become more complex.

Imagine a large financial institution considering using a certain public chain to handle core asset transactions. What’s the first thing they would do? Turn the source code inside out. Making the code open indeed facilitates auditing, but at what cost? All technical implementation details, potential vulnerabilities, and clever business logic are laid bare for competitors and malicious hackers to see.

For projects that claim to be "Privacy + Compliance," this contradiction hits especially close to home. Your core competitive advantage often lies in your code’s design philosophy. Fully open source is equivalent to giving away your key chips to imitators.

A more practical problem is that financial institutions typically develop their own proprietary smart contracts on your chain—contracts that often carry their trade secrets and competitive advantages. If the project team mandates that everything must be open source, these institutions simply won’t buy it. This creates a vicious cycle: to attract financial giants, you need to give them privacy space; but doing so seems to go against the ideals of the open source community.

The only apparent solution is a layered strategy—maintain open and transparent core infrastructure to gain trust and facilitate audits; but leave enough autonomy at the application and business logic layer. This way, you avoid complete capitulation to commercial compromises and won’t scare away genuine clients with pure idealism. The question is, how to walk this tightrope? No one has provided a standard answer.