Dusk tightens when the committee looks intact on DuskDS and the attestation certificate still doesn’t materialize.
The validator answers pings. The box isn’t dead. The process isn’t crashed. You can watch blocks advance and still have one transition sitting there like it’s allergic to closing. Not disputed. Not malformed. Just… not ratified.
People reach for the obvious: network? latency? some noisy peer? Nothing. The committee list hasn’t imploded. The missing piece is quieter than that. Stake that was counted earlier in the epoch stops counting the way this window needs it to count. Maturity boundary. Unbonding schedule. Whatever label you want—inside Succinct Attestation, “present” isn’t the same thing as “eligible to attest right now.”
That difference hurts because it doesn’t look like a fault.
Ops pulls the Dusk's committee view again. Same names. Same keys. Same uptime. Then you do the annoying part: line up the committee window for the transition with the staking context that’s live at that exact slot, not the one you were assuming. The weight you thought you had is there on paper and useless in practice. The protocol isn’t being dramatic about it. It just refuses to close without the required attestation weight.
Downstream doesn’t care why. It just backs up.
The workflow you promised would settle under deterministic finality now has a dead space in the middle. No revert to point at. No slash to blame. No “validator misbehavior” story that lets people stop asking questions. Just a state transition waiting for signatures that the system won’t accept from the validators you can still see.
That’s when the call gets stupidly tense.
Someone says “retry.” There’s nothing to retry. Someone says “wait one block.” You wait. Another block lands. Still no certificate. You start checking whether the next committee context will even help or whether you’re going to roll the whole thing into the next window and eat the scheduling fallout.
On DuskDS, the chain doesn’t do you the favor of pretending stake is stable while it’s moving.
And right now it’s moving. So the transition stays open, and the only real question left is how long you sit in that gap before the next committee window makes the math true again. $DUSK
