INSIGHTER Yi Xi

The life of settlement is dull up to the time when it collapses. I put that phrase in 2021, and I do. Most chains may appear wonderful on a fine day, but the instant markets become stressed, bridges are congested or finality is turned into a debate, you see how much the industry has been streamlining to look good rather than good. The reason why @Dusk Foundation attracted my attention is that it does not begin with the glitzy layer. It begins with the section which is to determine whether anything you construct can ever be relied on to pay off, to clean up and be irreparable, when it counts.

The vision that @Dusk is pursuing is fairly straightforward: a privacy-first financial foundation that is regulated, and you do not need to decide between privacy and the real world. There is a reason why regulated markets are not operated on the basis of public exposure, but rather on the basis of controlled disclosure, clear settlement guarantees, and systems which can be audited without making every player transparent. The network economics are even structured to facilitate that gravity with the $DUSK token serving as the native currency and a reward to participate in the consensus, such as staking to secure and validate.

The reason why DuskDS is in the middle of this narrative is that it is not an additional module, but rather the foundation layer. The architecture of Dusk itself places DuskDS as the bottom layer of the settlement, consensus, and data availability layer giving finality and security to the execution environments established above it, such as DuskEVM and other modules. That is a very calculated sequence. Settlement is not stuck on afterwards. You construct it, and then transfer those guarantees to the application layer rather than recreating them in a bad manner in each dApp.

It is even more significant when considering where Dusk Foundation is heading since 2025 and the transition towards a more modular, multi-layer structure that leaves DuskDS as the consensus and settlement foundation but allows the execution of EVMs above it and privacy-focused execution alongside it. With sufficient monolithic everything roadmaps of 2017 to 2020, I know how frequently complexity turns out to be revealed late and promises are broken early. DuskDS-first is fundamentally Dusk Foundation declaring that it will make settlement deterministic and institution-ready, and then they will enable developers to write fast code without it becoming a guessing game over the base layer.

This is why it is different to me. Compliance automation and privacy controls cease being marketing rhetoric and become protocol behavior when the settlement layer is no longer an afterthought but rather a product. Dusk Foundation is creating a chain in which actual settlement is not a promise, but the point of departure and DuskDS is making that statement not empty.

#dusk

People think Terra Classic is frozen in time. Like it collapsed in 2022 and never stood up again. But that story is outdated. Real work has been happening on LUNC in silence, without hype, without marketing, just builders and validators pushing code, fixing modules, and rebuilding parts of the chain that most traders never even look at.
Behind the price chart, Terra Classic is still a live blockchain. Developers are upgrading the Cosmos SDK, patching security vulnerabilities, improving CosmWasm smart-contract support, and keeping the network compatible with the wider Cosmos ecosystem. This is not glamorous work. It doesn’t create instant green candles. But this is exactly how real chains survive long term. A chain that can’t upgrade dies. LUNC is still upgrading.
What makes this even more interesting is how everything now runs through governance. There is no centralized Terraform Labs controlling LUNC anymore. Every meaningful change is proposed, debated, and voted on by validators and the community. That includes economic experiments like repeg mechanisms, restoring old market modules, changing tax and burn logic, and upgrading legacy contracts. Slowly, Terra Classic is evolving from a broken stablecoin experiment into a community-driven Layer 1 network.
One of the biggest behind-the-scenes goals is restoring functionality. The market module, native swaps, stablecoin mechanics, and cross-chain connectivity are being worked on so LUNC can once again support real DeFi instead of just being a meme coin. At the same time, on-chain burns and tax systems continue to reduce circulating supply while the ecosystem tries to grow utility. This is not a magic fix. It is long, boring, technical rebuilding. But this is exactly how projects come back from the dead.
Most people only look at $LUNC when it pumps or dumps. Smart observers watch what is being built when nobody is paying attention. Terra Classic is no longer about Do Kwon, Terraform Labs, or the old UST disaster. It is about whether a decentralized community can take a broken chain and slowly turn it into something functional again. And that work is happening right now, quietly, behind the screens.
If you know how crypto cycles work, you already understand why this matters. Hype brings price. Infrastructure brings survival. LUNC is focusing on survival first. And history shows that when forgotten chains quietly rebuild, they often surprise everyone later.

#USNonFarmPayrollReport #USTradeDeficitShrink #ZTCBinanceTGE #BinanceHODLerBREV #CPIWatch

In 2016, I continued to be impressed by the purity of everything on-chain, everything visible. It was like fairness of the purest type. Next I spent some time observing what that sight actually becomes in practice: trading desks tracking flows, competitors tracking treasury moves, bots running every public intention, and ordinary users finding their wallet is essentially a public profile with a balance on it. It is not transparency as trust. That is exposure as a permanent state of being, and it silently alters the manner in which people act within the network.

By 2019, the debate began to change to focus not on whether privacy is permissible but how can you maintain privacy without violating accountability. That is the tension that has been constructed by @Dusk Foundation at the beginning. Not the meme version of privacy in which you vanish, but the adult version in which you are allowed to keep personal information confidential and still demonstrate that you are operating within the necessary regulations. @Dusk Foundation views trust as something you have demonstrated with proofs, not something that you delegate to vibes, mass doxxing, and central databases of compliance.

The thing that I like about this method is that it does not claim that regulated reality will disappear. Neither does it go by the slack approach where accepting the compliance to mean putting the ledger on a surveillance pipe. This is meant to be auditable privacy, and that term only sounds weird until you start thinking like an institution or like an auditor. They do not require your full biography. They require certain responses: was this transaction policy compliant, does the counterparty have the necessary eligibility, is this settlement justifiable, can a regulator know something because there is a legal purpose to enquire. Dusk Foundation is constructed to that type of selective truth, where disclosure is managed, scoped and provable rather than to the entire internet.

Here is where the details count. Public chains are easy to audit since everything is already exposed but are also easier to manipulate, profile as well as front-run since everything is exposed. Dusk Foundation reverses that model. It is confidential by default, and then allows verification by cryptographic evidence and authorized disclosure when required. In simple words, you can authenticate compliance without making all the users pay the price of privacy in the form of an entry fee. It is a design choice, not a marketing statement, and it is the type of choice that stands the test of time.

I will include the $DUSK token here since it is an element of making this a living system and not a whitepaper vision. When you are creating a network that must remain credible during audit, you must have incentives that ensure that validators and participants remain maintained into the right direction and security. DUSK is not utility in the superficial meaning. It belongs to the coordination layer which assists the protocol in maintaining a serious environment in which settlement integrity and accountability are important.

By 2022, with enough public outbursts throughout the industry, more individuals had come to admit what Dusk Foundation has been designing around it all along: raw transparency does not necessarily build trust and raw privacy is not taking serious markets. The future isn't "choose one." It is constructing systems of privacy in which privacy is not made a blind spot, and audits can occur without making each user a public object. That is why I find myself back to Dusk Foundation. It is not attempting to make privacy appear innocuous. It is attempting to make privacy verifiable. #dusk