Recently, I saw a very interesting discussion in several tech communities—the contradiction between privacy chains and cross-chain interoperability. Someone raised a thought-provoking question: For projects like DUSK, which encrypt all on-chain transactions, how can they communicate with fully transparent public chains? This logic seems fundamentally incompatible.

This question stumped me. After some thought, I realized that the most widely used cross-chain bridge solutions essentially follow the same core logic—locking assets on the source chain, verifying on the target chain, and issuing mapped assets. But this process relies on an implicit premise: all information must be publicly auditable. Privacy chains invert this—transaction details are encrypted, and you simply cannot prove to another chain that "I really locked those assets." It’s like taking an anonymous deposit slip to a bank for a loan; the bank cannot verify its authenticity, and the entire process cannot proceed.

This exposes a fundamental assumption in current cross-chain infrastructure—that all blockchains should be as transparent as a mirror. From the very beginning, the entire design of bridges has been built on the premise of "data that can be publicly verified." But when privacy becomes a native attribute of a chain, this long-standing mechanism hits a wall.

DUSK’s approach is quite interesting: it doesn’t force transparency nor expects the other party to understand its privacy. Instead, they devised a completely new "trust transfer" mechanism. The key lies in their "Verification Committee" scheme—when users want to transfer assets across chains, they don’t just send encrypted transactions directly to the target chain (which wouldn’t understand them anyway), but instead establish a trusted cross-chain bridge through this committee. This way, the privacy of the source chain is protected, while the target chain can accept and verify the transaction’s authenticity, cleverly bridging the cognitive gap between the two worlds.