Dusk is where an RFQ can die after you already decided to take it.
The quote is live. Size checks out. Counterparty’s cleared. You hit accept—the same motion you’ve made a thousand times—and expect the rest to be mechanical.
It isn’t.
What comes back isn’t a Dusk dispute or a rejection. It’s a question you didn’t realize you were still answering: does this quote still qualify right now.
The acceptance was shaped inside a validity window measured in actual time, not desk time. Not “we were basically there.” Your side signs. Their side signs. Nothing weird in the network. No one backs out. And still the trade doesn’t settle, because the only timestamp that counts is the one execution is willing to anchor to. Miss it and there’s no downgrade path. No “late but close enough.” Just late.
I’ve seen this derail an otherwise quiet afternoon. Someone said, “we took it before the minute flipped.” Someone else pulled up chat logs like they were evidence. They weren’t. We were arguing intent. The system was enforcing a boundary that doesn’t care what the room remembers.
And it doesn’t behave like an outage.
Other flows keep clearing. The venue stays green. Nothing lights up. You’re left staring at a single trade-shaped thing that feels done to every human in the loop and unfinished to the chain. That gap is where the time goes.
People reach for the wrong levers.
“Can we roll the same price?”
“Can we book it and settle after?”
That’s how timing rules turn into habits. Dusk won’t help you do that. If the window closed, it closed. There’s no softer interpretation waiting behind it.
So the desk eats the friction. Re-request. Re-quote. Re-accept. And now you’re explaining—again—why something everyone saw as completed never actually existed in a form the system could honor.
After a few of these, nobody talks about quotes like messages anymore. They start treating them like expiring execution rights.
The last seconds stop feeling negotiable.
