I did not experience any meaningful wait times at Ethereum the first time I was made to feel them was not some crazy meme-coin launch. It happened on a regular day when I was simply trying to get a transaction through and it did not. You are sitting there and watching a wallet spinner as though it is 2009 buffering a YouTube video. At that point you start becoming aware of this fact: speed is not a luxury feature in markets. It’s part of the risk.
That is the view traders are sometimes missing when they refer to fast chains. Speed is not about boasting. Speed is relates to the rate at which you can respond, how well capital flows, and the degree of execution risk that you have to assume. That is where the positioning of Dusk is intriguing, particularly once you consider it in comparison with Ethereum who is not a technology fanboy, but rather a person interested in settlement time, fees, and predictable execution.
Ethereium is now a settlement layer all over the world, but it is not supposed to be instant. Average block time of the network is approximately of the order of 12 seconds. That is quick until you thought about the actual user experience. The majority of applications do not consider one block as final. They demand several confirmations, in particular, when the value is significant or when reorgs, MEV interference or competing transactions are possible. That, in fact, can extend a simple action into minutes in average times, and more in case of spikes in demand. At peak times, the mempool is turned into a bidding war. If you underpay gas, you wait. When you over pay, you feel like you have been taxed to live.
The second part of this picture is fees. Ether fee is a dynamism. By the end of 2025, the mean transaction fee was floating around around 0.30-0.33 per transaction on certain datasets. That is not disastrous and much better than the worst times in the history of Ethereum. However, averages conceal the reality experienced by traders volatility. Onchain demand spikes, and fees may spike very quickly during unexpected market events, particularly when individuals are hastening to swap, bridge, liquidate, or leave. Other sources also mention the similarity of the high levels of Ethereum fees, which have existed in the past when the ethereum was at its peak congestion.
So what is it specifically, that Dusk is doing differently?
Dusk was designed with a smaller vision than Ethereum: controlled fintech infrastructure in which privacy and compliance must co-exist. Dusk favors privacy-conscious design and institutional processes as opposed to defaulting everything into an entirely public, completely transparent mempool. The most important aspect to traders is that Dusk architecture is seeking a faster and more deterministic finality of its own consensus model, and not be the world computer to all applications.
The documentation of the economic model of Dusk states that in an ideal situation, block finalization will require at least 8 seconds with a target block time of 15 seconds. That does not necessarily imply that it is faster than Ethereum in a simple sense, as the base block time of Ethereum is slightly lower on average. Raw block time is not really the difference. That is what that block time refers to.
Ether is also meant to be decentralized and highly secure at mass scale, yet it is also overwhelmed by the demand of the world. You are competing with all of them: DeFi whales, NFT mints, bridges, liquidations, arbitrage bots, and whatever the market is crazed about this week. It is that pressure of demand that causes the feeling of the wait time in cases where even the chain actually is running blocks steadily.
Dusk believes that by concentrating on a particular lane (tokenized assets, institutional settlement, compliant DeFi, privacy-aware operations), it is possible to design to ensure cleaner execution and easier throughput. Its consensus is said to consist of phases, one of them being the selection of leaders through Proof-of-Blind Bid and other steps of the agreement aimed at finalizing blocks. In simple English: the system is designed in such a way that blocks do not merely get produced but rather they are agreed and finalized using a systematic process.
This is important in that, as a trader, the anguish is not as follows: Etherium is slow. The suffering is Ethereum is erratic. With unpredictable networks, positions cannot be sized, time entries cannot be accurately managed, and exits cannot be managed in a fine-tuning manner. You begin padding against slipping, padding against delay, padding against worst-case gas spikes. That makes execution a game of chance.
And now, zoom out to the trend that is forcefully remaking everything: tokenization and regulated onchain finance. It is not the noisy retail DeFi cycle where individuals are chasing yield. It is a world of tokenized securities, funds, real-life assets and institutions that are concerned with audit trails, controllable privacy and compliance. Dusk is specifically architected with that type of requirement in mind and this is why the tradeoff of the network should be known: this is not attempting to host everything. It is attempting to excel at something that conventional finance requires.
And this is where the affordable aspect comes in.
Etherium may be cheap at low demand periods yet it may be very costly at high demand. The enduring nature of Dusk is that a regulated finance chain should not be treated as a bidding-war as commonly seen in the use of Ethereum mainnet. That does not mean that the fees will always be low, but it alters the perception of fees. When the chain is articulated to carry financial products in which cost is to be predictable, -think settlement rails, issuance systems, compliant exchanges, etc - then spiky fees are a design failure and not a temporary inconvenience.
When you are analyzing Dusk as a trader or an investor, the best way of thinking about it is not Etherium killer. That’s not realistic. Etherium is too fixated, too fluid, too socially and financially rooted. A superior framing is the following: Ethereum is a general-purpose settlement layer where you lease blockspace in a global market. Dusk is attempting to provide a more dedicated highway upon which the traffic regulation is compiled of disciplined resources, privacy-conserving transactions, and community conduct.
And myself I believe that the difference is more important than the standard speed arguments. Since speed happens only to be useful when it has been combined with reliability. The type of reliability in which you also do not have to worry about whether your transaction will be settled fast or you will be expected to pay 5 times the standard price because everybody panicked at the same time.
That is the literal meaning of outpacing the wait times of Ethereum. Failing to beat 12 seconds in 11.
