If compliance has built Dusk's competitive barrier, then the underlying technical architecture and economic incentives are the true sources of power. Here, we focus on Dusk's self-developed Piecrust virtual machine, real-time settlement design, and the ecological value capture of the DUSK token.

The virtual machine determines what a public chain can do. Ethereum has EVM, Solana has SVM, and Dusk has built Piecrust.

Speaking of which, Piecrust actually evolved from Rusk — the world's first virtual machine tailored for zero-knowledge proofs. What's the use of this? Running ZK applications on traditional EVM is very disadvantageous. Generating a privacy proof? Gas fees are exorbitant, and the speed is slow. Piecrust took a different approach, using a Host-Guest architecture to increase the efficiency of ZK proof generation and verification by more than 10 times.

As a result, developers can write privacy smart contracts on Dusk as smoothly as writing regular contracts.

Imagine an institution issuing a fund on-chain. The investor list is protected by ZK proofs, share transfers are kept secret, but the total fund shares and compliance data are transparent and verifiable across the network. This is the power of confidential smart contracts — privacy, verifiability, and compliance all in one. Currently, few projects in the market can do this.