On a night in January 2025, a system administrator at a leading securities trading platform in Amsterdam routinely shut down the servers. Little did he know that over €300 million in trading records, equity certificates, and settlement instructions were waiting to be processed on the next business day. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, an Asian investor had just purchased European green bonds—during the next 72-hour settlement cycle, he could only pray that data would not be mishandled between cross-border banks, custodians, and clearinghouses.

This is the current state of traditional finance: a system still operating on 19th-century telegraph logic and 20th-century server architecture, moving trillions of capital daily, yet as fragile as a house of cards.

Until protocols like Dusk emerged, using code to rebuild financial infrastructure on-chain.

**Efficiency Black Hole: Why Is Cross-Border Settlement So Difficult?**

Have you ever bought overseas stocks through an international broker? Then you’ve experienced this "process": T+2 settlement (funds only arrive two days after the trade), international transfer fees often dozens of dollars, funds locked for several days, and numerous custodial and settlement fees. Retail investors find this troublesome, but for institutional investors, the problems are much greater.

An investment manager from a European family office once told us, "We want to allocate to Asian assets, but just the settlement cycle and foreign exchange costs can eat up a large part of the returns." So many quality trading opportunities are simply killed by inefficient financial infrastructure.