Dusk stiffens when the identity lane agrees with you… and the settlement lane doesn’t.
A trade matches cleanly. Two parties, same terms. The trouble starts after, when you try to net or compress and the workflow asks for a link you treated as automatic: prove these two legs are the same kind of position.
They aren’t. Not in the way netting needs.
One leg cleared under the venue’s credential posture. The other cleared under a slightly different Dusk's disclosure scope... still valid, still final. Now you’re asking for a single post-trade action that treats both as equivalent inventory. On Dusk, equivalence isn’t a feeling and it isn’t “close enough.” If the netting step requires a shared compliance context, you either have it, or you don’t.
And it doesn’t fail like settlement usually fails.
Nothing reverts. No incident narrative appears. Blocks keep closing. You just don’t get the next state transition. Two positions sit side-by-side, both correct, and they refuse to collapse into one outcome because the proofs behind them don’t line up into the same eligibility story.
I’ve seen this hit mid-day, right when everyone wants numbers to get simpler. A risk lead asks for net exposure before the next sweep. Someone says it’s already basically net. Then the netting call won’t qualify. Silence. A few minutes of people staring at the same dashboard like it’s lying, and it isn’t. The chain is.
The instinct shows up fast: loosen something.
Treat them as fungible just for netting. Disclose a bit more so the postures match. Add a temporary carve-out. That move spreads. It always spreads. Dusk makes it hard to do quietly because the moment you collapse two regulated legs into one result, the chain wants the right proof for the collapse, not a good argument for why it should be allowed.
So the desk ends up doing the slow work, not the clever work.
Re-qualify one leg into the posture the other already sits in. Unwind and re-enter under a unified constraint set. Or carry the gross longer than planned and eat the awkwardness in the next meeting. None of it is elegant. It’s just what happens when netting depends on proof alignment, not economic symmetry.
And once you’re there, urgency doesn’t help. You can’t negotiate equivalence into existence.
You either rebuild the legs so they match under the same rules, or you sit with two “done” positions that still won’t behave like one. #Dusk
