The Dusk signatures keep coming in, one after another, while the transition just sits there.
Nothing looks broken. Validators respond. The proposal isn’t disputed. From the outside it feels like momentum.... activity without resistance. From the chain’s point of view, it is already over. The committee window of Dusk closed and whatever arrived after that belongs to a moment the state machine no longer accepts.
Dusk's Succinct Attestation doesn’t reward “eventually.” It rewards “in-window.”
A state transition enters the pipeline tied to a specific committee window. The accountable set is fixed. The weight requirement is known. What matters is not whether enough signatures exist in aggregate, but whether enough of them cross the line before the window expires. Miss that boundary and the certificate doesn’t become “almost right.” It becomes the wrong artifact for this transition.
I have been in the places when this misread happens. “More votes are coming in,” someone says, watching signatures stack up. “They’re responsive,” someone else adds. All true. Still stuck.
Those signatures were real. They just landed after the only moment when they could ratify that transition. The protocol doesn’t stretch the window because it looks sincere. It treats late weight like no weight for this step.
So teams do the usual dance in the wrong place.
Connectivity. Uptime. RPC. “Is someone censoring?” Everything checks out. Meanwhile the only thing that changed is the clock the committee was supposed to hit. On Dusk, that clock is part of execution, not a soft expectation you negotiate around.
Deterministic finality on Dusk either lands inside the window or it doesn’t land at all. Anything downstream stays parked, even if the ops channel is filling up with screenshots of signatures that feel persuasive.
Then the loop starts: collect what you can, paste it into the thread, wait for the next committee window, re-attempt under a fresh context. Now you’re explaining two timelines internally—the one where “it should’ve closed,” and the one the chain actually recognized.
No alarms. No villain. Just a transition that wouldn’t take late attestations as evidence, and won’t, and won’t… #Dusk @Dusk $DUSK
