Every cycle, blockchains compete on the same scoreboard: faster blocks, cheaper fees, higher TPS. It’s measurable, it’s easy to compare, and it creates a clean narrative for marketing. But if you’re trying to understand which networks can realistically support institutional and regulated finance, that scoreboard is incomplete. Throughput is not the hard part anymore. Private settlement is.
Most generic L1s are designed like open glass ledgers. That transparency is useful for auditability, but it creates a structural problem for serious financial activity. In real markets, participants cannot operate while broadcasting positions, flows, counterparties, and trading intent to everyone. Even if identities are “pseudonymous,” behavior is not. Over time, on-chain analytics can cluster addresses, infer strategies, and map out patterns. The chain becomes an information feed that others can exploit.
This is where the adoption story breaks. Institutions don’t reject blockchains because finality is too slow by two seconds. They reject them because public settlement leaks business strategy. A fund can’t comfortably rebalance if the market can watch it. A market maker can’t manage inventory efficiently if every movement is observable. An issuer can’t manage treasury flows if every transfer signals intent and invites front-running. Even in DeFi, information leakage translates into worse execution. In regulated environments, it becomes an operational and reputational risk.
That is why “TPS wars” often feel disconnected from the real constraints of finance. A chain can settle fast and still be unusable if settlement is fully public.
Private settlement is hard because it is not just “hide the wallet.” The market doesn’t need your name to exploit you. It needs your size, timing, direction, and behavior. So app-layer workarounds rarely solve the core issue. Mixers, address rotation, and privacy tools can reduce identity linkage, but they often fail to protect the economic information that matters most in professional markets. And once you move privacy off-chain or into a separate permissioned environment, you lose the simplicity that made public chains attractive in the first place.
This is where Dusk fits differently from generic L1s. The point is not that Dusk is “faster.” The point is that Dusk is built around the idea that settlement can be confidential while remaining verifiable. That is a fundamentally different optimization target. Instead of assuming everything must be public and trying to patch privacy on top, it starts from the reality that regulated finance needs confidentiality as a baseline requirement.
The key shift is the concept of provability without disclosure. In regulated markets, “privacy” cannot mean a black box. Compliance still matters. Auditability still matters. But those requirements don’t demand that every detail be exposed to everyone. They demand that the rules can be proven to the right parties when required. This is why cryptographic proof systems, especially zero-knowledge approaches, are so central to serious privacy infrastructure: they allow a system to prove correctness without revealing the private inputs that would leak strategy.
Once you accept that model, you stop judging chains by “how fast can it publish everything,” and you start judging them by “can it settle confidentially while still enforcing and proving constraints.”
That’s also why the more honest comparison set for Dusk is not another general-purpose L1 trying to win retail mindshare. The meaningful question is whether a network can support the requirements institutions actually care about: confidentiality without sacrificing verifiability, compliance compatibility, deterministic settlement, and a system that doesn’t turn participants into public targets.
None of this guarantees adoption. Technology alone never does. Tooling has to mature. Integrations matter. Real use cases matter. But from a strategy perspective, it explains why Dusk’s narrative is not a “speed pitch.” It’s a “market reality pitch.”
TPS is easy because it’s mostly engineering and incentives. Private settlement is hard because it forces you to reconcile three things that are usually in conflict: confidentiality, correctness, and compliance.
And that’s the point.
If crypto truly wants to host regulated assets and institutional workflows, the winning chains will not be the ones that simply get faster at doing public settlement. They will be the ones that make settlement usable for real markets—confidential where it should be, verifiable where it must be.
