After several episodes focused on security, this one turns to privacy, with Emanuele Francioni, co-founder and CEO of Dusk, a blockchain built for privacy and institutional use cases.
Emanuele traces the through-line from a contrarian 2018 thesis to a live network to abstract financial instruments away from the intermediaries that leak both value and data. A core thread is the counterintuitive relationship between privacy and regulation. He disentangles anonymity from confidentiality, shows how privacy actually underpins rules like...
After several episodes focused on security, this one turns to privacy, with Emanuele Francioni, co-founder and CEO of Dusk, a blockchain built for privacy and institutional use cases.
Emanuele traces the through-line from a contrarian 2018 thesis to a live network to abstract financial instruments away from the intermediaries that leak both value and data. A core thread is the counterintuitive relationship between privacy and regulation. He disentangles anonymity from confidentiality, shows how privacy actually underpins rules like GDPR, DORA, and insider-trading law, and explains how Dusk encodes KYC, jurisdiction, and limits directly into the protocol.
Then it gets harder: on a privacy chain, a vulnerability can be exploited in the dark. Emanuele uses the recent Zcash unbounded-mint bug to explain why Dusk's approach has to be proactive, why the team shipped three security upgrades this year (Aegis and Boreas among them), and why simplicity is the best safeguard. On the AI arms race he's candid, seeing Fable in action for three days genuinely scared him, but his conclusion is pointed: AI doesn't replace security expertise; it makes it more valuable.
Key Topics
Privacy vs confidentiality vs anonymity, and why privacy underpins regulation
Encoding regulatory compliance directly into a protocol
Securing a privacy-preserving chain, and the AI arms race in security
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:05 Founding Dusk in 2018 and the Road to PLONK
07:14 How Privacy Fits the Regulatory Space
08:00 Anonymity vs Confidentiality: Disentangling "Privacy"
15:11 Selective Disclosure and Working With Regulators
21:30 Encoding KYC, Jurisdiction, and Limits Into the Protocol
24:25 How Privacy Changes the Approach to Security
27:12 The Zcash Unbounded-Mint Bug and Why Privacy Must Be Proactive
29:30 The Security Arms Race and Five Attack Attempts This Year
34:50 Why Simplicity Is the Best Safeguard
36:12 The Complexity Trade-Off: Custom VM, Sandboxing, Immutable Contracts
40:14 Shrinking the Layer One: Dusk EVM and a Privacy-Preserving L2
43:21 The AI Arms Race: Aegis, Boreas, and Restructuring Into "Pods"
50:22 Cross-Pollination: Pulling Ideas From Biology Into Software
55:10 Where AI Helps in Security, and Where Humans Still Matter
1:02:19 Oak's Research: Minor Human Intervention, Completely Different Output
1:04:27 Surprising Findings in Aegis: the BLS Truncation Bug
1:06:45 Boreas: a Live Incident and Real-Time Response
1:11:00 Operational Security, Supply Chain, and AI-Era Hiring
1:16:56 Wrap-Up
Resources and Links
Emanuele on X: https://x.com/autholykos
Dusk: https://dusk.network
Oak Security's Research: https://research.oaksecurity.io/
