Looking at Dusk together with other privacy projects, it always feels a bit out of place. Most privacy-focused projects compete on anonymity strength, resistance to censorship, or even deliberately distancing themselves from regulators, but Dusk doesn’t take this route. It’s contemplating a more realistic issue: how should privacy be handled when assets are truly on-chain at a large scale?

In traditional finance, privacy never means "no one can see anything." When you transfer money at a bank, the bank definitely knows, but strangers on the street don’t; tax authorities can access the ledger but wouldn’t post every transaction on a bulletin board. Dusk aims to bring this logic onto the blockchain, rather than simply anonymizing everything in a brute-force manner.

This makes its technical approach easier to understand. Zero-knowledge proofs here are not for creating black box operations but for achieving "conditional transparency." Your transactions are hidden from the public, but when needed, you can prove to specific institutions that the source of assets is legitimate, your holdings are compliant, and your investor identity meets regulations. This is an essential feature for security tokens and regulated financial products.

Looking at its market positioning makes it even clearer. Dusk does not position itself as a general-purpose public chain but focuses tightly on the niche of regulated assets. This might seem to limit imagination, but in reality, it actually increases the chances of success. The large sums of money in the real world flow within regulatory frameworks, and only this segment can truly generate scale effects. Dusk aims not to be the most free chain but the one that best aligns with modern financial logic.