Crypto keeps repeating the same promise: “institutions are coming.”
But very few people stop to ask what kind of infrastructure institutions actually need.
In traditional finance, transparency is controlled, not absolute. Banks don’t broadcast treasury movements in real time. Funds don’t reveal positions before execution. Corporations don’t expose internal capital flows to competitors. This isn’t secrecy for wrongdoing — it’s how risk, compliance, and fiduciary responsibility are managed. Yet most public blockchains force a level of transparency that simply doesn’t exist in real financial systems.
That’s why the idea that institutions will migrate en masse to fully transparent chains feels unrealistic to me.
This is where Dusk Network fits into the conversation in a way that feels more grounded. Dusk isn’t trying to reinvent finance with slogans. It’s addressing a structural problem: how do you bring regulated financial activity on-chain without exposing sensitive data or breaking regulatory requirements?
The key difference, in my view, is that Dusk treats privacy as a functional necessity rather than a philosophical statement. The network is designed so that transactions and data can remain confidential by default, while still allowing proof of compliance when required. That balance matters. Institutions don’t want anonymity without accountability, and regulators won’t accept systems they can’t audit. Dusk’s approach attempts to satisfy both sides without forcing compromises that make the system unusable.
A lot of blockchains assume transparency automatically equals trust. In reality, trust in finance comes from enforceable rules, auditability, and controlled disclosure. Selective privacy — the ability to reveal information to the right parties at the right time — is far closer to how real markets operate. From that perspective, fully public ledgers are not the endgame; they’re an early experiment.
Another reason this model stands out to me is the direction of regulation. Whether people like it or not, financial activity at scale will always be regulated. The question isn’t if rules will exist, but whether blockchains can adapt to them without losing their advantages. A chain that ignores this reality may attract retail users, but it’s unlikely to host serious institutional volume. Dusk seems to be building with that inevitability in mind rather than fighting it.
This is also why I don’t see projects like Dusk as short-term narratives. They’re infrastructure bets. If tokenized securities, funds, and regulated assets are going to live on-chain in the future, the underlying networks will need privacy, compliance, and performance baked in from the start. Retrofitting those features later is far harder than designing around them early.
From my perspective, the debate isn’t “privacy versus transparency.” It’s whether crypto wants to remain a parallel system for speculation, or evolve into actual financial infrastructure. If it’s the latter, models that combine confidentiality with regulatory compatibility are not optional — they’re inevitable.
So I’ll leave this open for discussion: do you believe large institutions will ever operate meaningful volume on chains where everything is public by default, or is a privacy-first, compliance-aware approach like Dusk the only realistic path forward? I’m genuinely interested in different viewpoints.