There is an old pattern in the blockchain circle: first launch a working version, then add features as you go. It's like quickly building a rough house, with plumbing, electricity, and heating installed later. This approach can indeed accelerate progress, but it also comes with many side effects—the pipelines added later are the most prone to problems.

However, some projects have taken a completely different path. Dusk chose to treat privacy and compliance as the foundational load-bearing walls in their initial architecture design. The cost is a longer development cycle and increased technical difficulty, but the payoff is a more solid foundation.

Many privacy solutions on the market today are essentially just temporary curtains installed outside transparent glass houses. These curtains have light leaks, can be blown away by the wind, and everyone can see that you’ve put up a curtain—making it a conspicuous marker.

Compliance solutions face similar issues. Many projects rely on off-chain verification combined with centralized audits to meet regulatory requirements. This is akin to forcefully installing a centralized security guard at the entrance of a decentralized supermarket—the trust structure of the entire system becomes very fragmented.

A friend who has worked in investment banking for over twenty years once told me: "If we handle transactions on the blockchain but still rely on manual review and offline documents to pass compliance, then why bother putting it on-chain?" That question hits hard.

In 2018, Dusk’s team faced a fork in the road: should they patch up an existing public chain or build from scratch? They chose not the quick fix but decided to rebuild entirely.

This decision had far-reaching implications: the virtual machine must be capable of directly handling privacy computations without relying on convoluted workarounds; the consensus mechanism must natively support compliance requirements rather than adding a verification layer afterward. Both factors significantly increased development difficulty.

Looking at it from today’s perspective, although this path initially seems to be at a disadvantage, if privacy and compliance are truly to become standard features of blockchain—and not just optional—designing from the ground up might be the only reliable choice. It may seem slow in the short term, but in the long run, it could be the fastest way forward.