JOSEPH DESOZE

@Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL #Walrus
Walrus Sites có ý nghĩa nhất khi tôi mô tả nó như một vấn đề thực tế thay vì một giao thức hấp dẫn, bởi vì ngay khi mọi người phụ thuộc vào giao diện của bạn, phần frontend sẽ không còn là "một trang web tĩnh đơn thuần" nữa mà trở thành lời hứa mong manh nhất bạn đưa ra với người dùng, và chúng ta đều đã thấy rõ cách lời hứa đó có thể sụp đổ nhanh chóng khi hosting bị ràng buộc với quy định tài khoản, trạng thái thanh toán, sự cố vùng miền, thay đổi chính sách của một nhà cung cấp duy nhất, hoặc một đội ngũ mất quyền truy cập vào bảng điều khiển cũ. Đó là lý do Walrus Sites ra đời: nó cố gắng trao cho các ứng dụng tĩnh một nơi trú ẩn hoạt động giống như cơ sở hạ tầng do chính bạn sở hữu thay vì sự tiện lợi thuê mướn bằng cách tách biệt rõ ràng các trách nhiệm, đặt các tệp website thực tế vào Walrus như dữ liệu bền vững, trong khi đặt danh tính của trang web và quyền nâng cấp vào Sui như trạng thái trên chuỗi khối, để cùng một địa chỉ vẫn có thể hoạt động dù nội dung bên dưới thay đổi, và quyền nâng cấp được đảm bảo bởi quyền sở hữu thay vì bởi bất kỳ ai vẫn còn có thông tin đăng nhập vào nền tảng hosting.

@Dusk $DUSK #Dusk
Dusk Foundation is one of those projects that makes more sense the moment you stop thinking about blockchains as public scoreboards and start thinking about them as infrastructure that real financial people have to trust. I’m talking about the kind of trust that survives audits, regulations, counterparties, and the everyday reality that institutions cannot expose every move they make to the entire internet. Dusk was founded in 2018 with a specific purpose: to build a Layer 1 blockchain for regulated, privacy focused financial infrastructure, where confidentiality and compliance are not enemies but partners. The project consistently positions itself around the idea that privacy can be built in by design while still allowing auditability and controlled disclosure when legitimate oversight requires it, and this is the core emotional point behind everything they’re doing: they want financial activity to feel safe again on-chain, not because nothing can be checked, but because the right things can be proven without forcing every detail into public view.

At a high level, Dusk is modular, and instead of using that word like a buzz term, it helps to picture what they mean in real life. They separate the part of the chain that decides what is true and final from the part of the chain where applications run. The documentation describes DuskDS as the settlement, consensus, and data availability layer providing security and finality, and above it they build execution environments, including DuskEVM, an Ethereum compatible execution layer that lets developers build with familiar EVM tooling while still settling to DuskDS. They also describe a future privacy oriented execution environment called DuskVM, and the point is to keep settlement stable while letting execution evolve, because finance can handle innovation in the app layer, but it cannot tolerate uncertainty in settlement.

When you follow how the system works step by step, everything begins with DuskDS, because that’s where consensus and settlement finality live. Dusk describes its consensus as Succinct Attestation, a proof of stake protocol that operates with committees in rounds, where blocks are proposed, validated, and ratified, and the design goal is deterministic finality suitable for financial settlement rather than a long, uncertain wait. To make that consensus stable under real network conditions, Dusk uses a networking approach called Kadcast, which they describe as a structured overlay method for broadcasting messages that reduces bandwidth and aims for predictable propagation compared to classic gossip broadcasting, and that choice matters because unpredictable propagation often turns into unpredictable confirmation times, which is exactly what real markets hate.

On top of this foundation, DuskDS supports two native transaction models, Moonlight and Phoenix, and this is where Dusk’s privacy story becomes practical rather than philosophical. Moonlight is the public account based mode with transparent balances and visible sender, recipient, and amount, while Phoenix is the shielded note based mode that uses zero knowledge proofs so a transaction can prove correctness without revealing everything about amounts or linkages. Dusk’s architecture materials also describe concepts like viewing capabilities and key separation that support selective disclosure, which is how Dusk aims to reconcile privacy with auditability, because the intent is not to hide forever, it is to keep confidentiality by default and reveal when legitimately required.

Then there is the execution environment. DuskEVM exists so smart contracts can run in a familiar Ethereum style world, and Dusk documents DuskEVM as leveraging the OP Stack and supporting EIP 4844 while settling to DuskDS rather than Ethereum, which tells you they’re attempting a careful blend: inherit the maturity of widely used EVM execution engineering while anchoring settlement and data availability in a base layer that was designed for privacy and regulated finance from the start. Dusk also introduces Hedger as a privacy engine for the EVM layer, and it is described as combining homomorphic encryption with zero knowledge proofs to enable confidential transactions on DuskEVM while keeping them auditable, which matters because privacy that cannot be integrated into the application world ends up staying theoretical, and the whole point here is making privacy usable in the workflows people actually build.

These technical choices are not random, and they reveal what Dusk believes institutions will actually pay attention to. Modular design reduces systemic upgrade risk by keeping settlement stable while allowing execution layers to evolve. EVM compatibility lowers the barrier to building because developers can use existing tools and mental models instead of starting from scratch. Deterministic settlement finality matters because financial markets price settlement risk into everything, and “maybe final later” is not good enough at institutional scale. Structured networking matters because performance is not only about throughput, it is about predictability under stress. And privacy built on proofs matters because institutions and regulators do not accept “trust me,” they accept verifiable correctness with controlled disclosure paths, which is exactly why Dusk’s documentation ties together Succinct Attestation, Kadcast, and Phoenix as core building blocks.

What really turns this from theory into a serious pathway is the way Dusk aligns with regulated partners. Dusk has publicly communicated its partnership with NPEX, and it frames NPEX as bringing a suite of financial licenses that can support regulated issuance and trading, positioning this as enabling protocol level compliance across the stack for regulated assets and licensed applications. NPEX itself has spoken about developing a blockchain based stock exchange with Dusk, and regardless of anyone’s opinions about any single partnership, this is the type of counterparty that forces a network to operate under real constraints rather than idealized narratives, because licensed venues do not have the option of being vague about compliance and operational integrity.

Then there is the settlement side, which is where many tokenization stories collapse if they do not have a credible instrument. Quantoz Payments, NPEX, and Dusk announced EURQ as a digital euro designed to open a path for traditional, regulated finance to operate at scale on the Dusk blockchain, and they highlight that it is the first time an MTF licensed stock exchange will utilize electronic money tokens through a blockchain. That statement matters because settlement assets are the bloodstream of markets, and if regulated markets are going to operate on-chain in a normal way, they need settlement instruments that regulators and institutions can accept without feeling like they’re stepping into a grey zone.

If you want to watch Dusk like infrastructure rather than like a short term hype cycle, the metrics that matter are the ones that reflect security, real usage, and reliability. Staking participation, validator health, and the presence of clear incentives and penalties matter because proof of stake security depends on disciplined operators, and Dusk’s staking materials describe slashing for invalid behavior and downtime, which is part of enforcing reliability rather than hoping for it. Real usage will show up in whether DuskEVM actually attracts active applications, whether transactions are driven by products rather than by noise, and whether privacy preserving flows are used in daily operations instead of being a feature that exists only in documentation. Reliability will show up in network stability, upgrade quality, and finalization behavior, and DuskEVM documentation notes that it currently inherits a seven day finalization period from the OP Stack with plans for future upgrades toward one block finality, which is the kind of detail that directly shapes what kinds of financial activity can comfortably run on the execution layer at different stages of maturity. On token fundamentals, Dusk’s own tokenomics documentation specifies an initial supply of 500 million DUSK with a maximum supply of 1 billion over time, which matters because issuance affects staking incentives and long term security economics even when you’re focused on adoption rather than price.

None of this removes the risks. Modular systems introduce complexity, and complexity demands careful audits, careful upgrade processes, and disciplined operations. Privacy systems are often misunderstood, so Dusk must repeatedly demonstrate that its privacy is designed for confidentiality with authorized disclosure rather than for avoiding oversight, because trust is social as much as technical. Regulated adoption takes time, and time can be misread by markets as failure when it may simply be the normal pace of licensing, integration, and institutional risk assessment. And regulatory interpretation changes, which means a project that aligns itself closely with regulated finance must keep adapting without breaking what already works, and that is a high standard to maintain.

If the future unfolds the way Dusk is designed, it will probably feel quiet and almost boring, and I mean that as a compliment. DuskDS would keep providing deterministic settlement with flexible privacy modes, DuskEVM would keep lowering the barrier for builders by keeping the developer experience familiar, and tools like Hedger would make confidentiality inside smart contracts feel normal rather than exotic. Partnerships like NPEX and settlement initiatives like EURQ could turn tokenization from a concept into a routine workflow, where issuance, trading, and settlement happen in a regulated, auditable way without forcing institutions to expose sensitive data publicly. And if that happens, the industry narrative shifts from “crypto versus finance” into “better rails for finance,” where compliance becomes programmable, settlement becomes faster, and privacy is respected instead of sacrificed.

I’m not going to claim Dusk is guaranteed to win, because building infrastructure for regulated markets is a long, demanding journey and success depends on execution, partners, and timing as much as it depends on good ideas. But I do think the direction is meaningful: people deserve systems where privacy does not feel suspicious, where compliance does not feel like a cage, and where participating on-chain does not require exposing your life, your strategy, or your clients to strangers. If Dusk keeps executing with the seriousness its design suggests, then one day the most inspiring outcome will be simple: on-chain finance will stop feeling risky and experimental, and it will start feeling normal, safe, and quietly trustworthy.

@Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL #Walrus
I’m going to talk about Walrus in a way that feels like real life, because the reason it exists is not complicated once you’ve watched how digital products actually break: people build something onchain, they tell users they own it, and then the most important parts of the experience, the big files, the media, the datasets, the real “stuff” that gives an app its personality, end up living somewhere offchain where a single outage, a single policy shift, or a single operator can quietly decide what remains accessible and what disappears. Walrus was created to close that gap by offering decentralized storage for large unstructured data blobs while keeping the coordination and proof of that storage anchored to the Sui blockchain, and that combination matters because it tries to replace vague trust with something you can verify. They’re not pretending blockchains should store everything directly, because that would be inefficient and expensive, so Walrus separates roles in a way that makes sense: the storage network holds the heavy data, and Sui acts as the control layer that tracks ownership, lifetimes, and the onchain objects that represent each stored blob, which means a developer can build logic around data availability in the same place they build the rest of their application logic, and users can feel the difference between “someone says the file is stored” and “the network has publicly committed to keeping it available for a defined period.”

When a file is stored in Walrus, it doesn’t get placed intact onto a single machine, and it doesn’t get copied in full to every node either, because both extremes are either too fragile or too costly, so the protocol uses erasure coding to transform the file into many encoded fragments often described as slivers, then distributes those slivers across many independent storage operators. This is where the design starts to feel serious, because the system is built on the assumption that nodes will fail, connections will drop, and operators will come and go, and instead of pretending that is rare, Walrus engineers for it by making recovery possible even when a large portion of those fragments are missing. That resilience is one of the main reasons people pay attention to Walrus: it aims to keep the effective redundancy closer to modern cost realities while still making the data recoverable under harsh conditions, and if it becomes widely used, most users will never talk about the encoding at all, they will simply feel the quiet relief of data that remains retrievable when it matters. The moment the blob becomes “real” in the system is not just when fragments are uploaded, it is when the protocol produces an onchain Proof of Availability certificate through Sui, which functions as a verifiable marker that the network has accepted the storage obligation, and that detail is more than technical ceremony, because it gives applications and users a shared reference point for what the network promised to do.

WAL exists inside this machine as more than a symbol, because decentralized storage without incentives is just a story that collapses under pressure, and Walrus ties incentives to accountability through staking, delegation, and performance consequences. Storage nodes put WAL at risk to participate, and token holders can delegate stake to help secure the network, which creates a practical alignment where operators earn rewards for providing reliable service, and poor performance can lead to penalties, which is the economic backbone that tries to turn reliability into a habit rather than a hope. I like that the project also frames payments in a way that aims to keep storage costs stable in fiat terms, because if you’ve ever tried to budget infrastructure in a volatile environment, you know how quickly a good idea becomes unusable when costs swing wildly, and this is one of those design choices that signals they’re thinking about actual builders trying to ship products, not only traders looking for a narrative. We’re seeing more projects realize that usability is not only about speed, it is about predictable operations, predictable pricing, and predictable guarantees, and Walrus is trying to deliver those guarantees through a blend of cryptographic proofs, distributed storage, and economic enforcement.

If you want to understand Walrus beyond hype, it helps to watch the things that would hurt if they went wrong, because storage is unforgiving in a way that many other crypto primitives are not. You watch whether the network is actually being used for real data, whether the number of independent operators is growing in a healthy way, whether stake distribution stays sufficiently diverse so the system does not drift into quiet centralization, and whether availability and recovery remain dependable during churn and stress, because those are the moments where a network proves it is infrastructure rather than a demo. At the same time, it is fair to acknowledge the risks, because they’re real: the protocol has to maintain reliable retrieval performance as it scales, incentives have to stay aligned as early subsidies evolve, and adoption is tied to the broader success of the Sui ecosystem because Sui is the coordination layer that makes Walrus programmable and verifiable. Still, if it becomes what it is reaching for, Walrus could help normalize a world where people store valuable data without that low-grade fear that it can vanish because one entity changed its mind, and that future is not about drama, it is about steady trust earned through boring reliability. I’m They’re If It becomes We’re seeing all point to the same simple hope here: that the tools we build can respect what people create by keeping it available, provable, and resilient, and that is an inspiring direction for decentralized technology to grow into.

@Dusk $DUSK #Dusk
Quỹ Dusk đã được xây dựng từ năm 2018 với một mục tiêu rất thực tế, dễ hiểu khi bạn hình dung cách các tổ chức tài chính thực sự vận hành, bởi vì các ngân hàng, sàn giao dịch và công ty được quản lý không thể hoạt động trong một thế giới mà mọi chuyển động giá trị đều trở thành thông tin công khai mãi mãi, và đó là lý do Dusk tập trung vào tài chính được quản lý với tính riêng tư được tích hợp ngay từ đầu. Tôi không nói về riêng tư như một thủ thuật để tránh quy định, tôi đang nói về riêng tư như một kỳ vọng bình thường bảo vệ khách hàng, bảo vệ chiến lược kinh doanh và bảo vệ sự ổn định thị trường, đồng thời vẫn cho phép giám sát hợp pháp và các đường đi kiểm toán rõ ràng khi cần thiết. Dusk trình bày mình như một blockchain lớp 1 được thiết kế cho cơ sở hạ tầng tài chính được quản lý và chú trọng riêng tư, và cốt lõi của ý tưởng này rất đơn giản: chúng tôi đang nhìn thấy một tương lai mà các tổ chức muốn hiệu quả của blockchain, nhưng họ không sẵn sàng hy sinh tính bảo mật để đạt được điều đó, vì vậy Dusk cố gắng khiến riêng tư và tuân thủ cảm giác như một phần của cùng một hệ thống thay vì hai kẻ thù đối đầu nhau.

@Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL #Walrus
Walrus tồn tại vì internet hiện đại hoạt động dựa trên dữ liệu nặng, không chỉ là văn bản, và phần lớn dữ liệu nặng này vẫn đang tồn tại ở những nơi mà một công ty duy nhất có thể thay đổi giá, thay đổi chính sách hoặc loại bỏ quyền truy cập, và ngay cả khi chúng ta xây dựng trên các blockchain, quyền sở hữu thường kết thúc ở một thứ được lưu trữ ở đâu đó khác mà có thể lặng lẽ biến mất. Walrus được thiết kế để làm cho liên kết yếu này cảm thấy mạnh mẽ hơn bằng cách chia nhỏ trách nhiệm theo cách phù hợp với thực tế: blockchain nên điều phối, xác minh và thực thi các cam kết, trong khi một mạng lưới chuyên dụng nên lưu giữ các byte thực tế theo cách bền bỉ, có thể chịu được sự cố nút và những hỗn loạn thực tế. Trong định vị riêng của mình, Walrus là một giao thức lưu trữ phi tập trung nhằm biến lưu trữ thành thứ có thể lập trình và hữu ích hơn cho các ứng dụng hiện đại, và nó định vị khả năng lập trình này trên Sui để các cam kết, dữ liệu mô tả và phần thưởng có thể được xử lý trên chuỗi, trong khi các khối dữ liệu lớn vẫn được giữ ngoài chuỗi.