We watch price. We watch TVL. We watch transaction counts. But there's one metric for a new mainnet that's almost invisible, yet absolutely critical: developer sentiment.
You won't find it on a dashboard. You sense it in Discord. In the GitHub commit history of early ecosystem projects. In the tone of a builder's tweet when they talk about encountering a bug—is it frustrated, or is it a puzzle they're determined to solve?
For #dusk k , this is the real foundation. You can't campaign or points-farm your way into a developer's genuine enthusiasm. They either click with the tooling, the documentation, the logic of the chain, or they don't. A mainnet launch for them isn't a finish line; it's the moment the proper workshop opens.
Right now, the developers are the only users who truly matter. The institutions will follow applications, and applications follow builders. So the quietest, most important story post-launch isn't happening on-chain. It's happening in code editors and team calls, as small squads decide whether to commit their precious time and talent here instead of somewhere else.
