Looking at the Dusk Network project, to understand its strategic logic, you actually need to start from one perspective—treating blockchain as the infrastructure truly entering the financial system.

You'll find that its approach is quite different. Unlike many projects that start by boasting about TPS speed or ecosystem size, Dusk has chosen a less traveled path, tackling a major challenge: how to achieve privacy protection within a compliant framework.

This issue seems contradictory, but traditional finance has long solved it. The way banks and brokerages operate is quite simple—transactions are kept confidential externally, but fully transparent to regulators. This system works smoothly in a centralized world. But when moved onto the chain, problems arise. Either everything is public, and privacy is lost; or everything is anonymous, and regulators can't intervene. Dusk's entry point is right here; it aims to use cryptography to rewrite the mature rules of the financial world onto the blockchain.

From a technical perspective, this isn't just about applying zero-knowledge proofs. Dusk builds its architecture around ZK from the ground up, independently developing the Piecrust virtual machine, which natively integrates privacy assets and compliance verification. What’s the result? Compliance isn't an afterthought or something remedied through manual audits or off-chain processes; it is directly embedded into the transaction logic. When a transaction occurs, compliance verification is completed simultaneously, but the specific transaction data isn't exposed externally. This is truly meaningful for institutional business.

In terms of application focus, Dusk is very clear about what it wants to do. It doesn't aim for "mass financial participation," but instead concentrates on more pragmatic areas—such as securities-like assets, compliant DeFi, and on-chain capital markets, which are relatively vertical scenarios.