There are many privacy projects on the market, but most are either just hype or rely on a single selling point to repeatedly hype. The true potential of a public chain's future is often determined by those invisible, intangible underlying architectures—such as virtual machine design.

Today, let's talk about why DUSK can stand out in this track. The key lies in its Piecrust VM. This is not just a simple performance optimization but a thorough paradigm shift.

**Current Situation: The Common Dilemma of Privacy Public Chains**

The so-called privacy public chains on the market are caught between two extremes—either transaction speeds are so slow that they are frustrating, or they sacrifice on-chain programmability for privacy. This actually reflects a fundamental contradiction: traditional virtual machine architectures are inherently incompatible with cryptographic computations like zero-knowledge proofs.

EVM is a typical example. Its gas consumption when handling ZK logic is notoriously high because the EVM's design was never intended for such complex cryptographic verification. As a result, if you want to run a privacy transaction, you first have to pay an exorbitant gas fee.

**Breakthrough of Piecrust VM**

DUSK's virtual machine takes a different approach. It is based on the WASM architecture, but the core innovation is—its entire memory model is tailored specifically for the generation and verification of ZK proofs.

In other words, every design decision of this virtual machine asks itself: "How can zero-knowledge computations run more smoothly?" rather than "How to make it compatible with all possible computing scenarios?"

According to open-source data on Github and stress test results from the testnet, Piecrust's throughput when handling Merkle tree updates and ZK circuit verification directly outperforms traditional ZK-Rollup solutions by an order of magnitude. This is not a minor optimization—it's a qualitative leap.

When the virtual machine itself understands ZK, privacy computing shifts from being an "additional burden" to an "native capability." This is the key to making privacy public chains truly usable.