Since its establishment in 2018, Dusk has been doing something that seems "counter-current"—integrating privacy, auditability, and compliance into the underlying code of the blockchain. During the era of wild growth in the crypto market, such a choice seemed somewhat out of place. But by 2026, you'll find that this persistence has hit the industry's inflection point.

The two major moves at the start of the year are quite impressive. First, the DuskEVM mainnet officially launched in the second week of January. Don't underestimate this EVM compatibility layer—it means developers can continue writing smart contracts in the Solitude language at very low cost. But these contracts will ultimately settle on Dusk's Layer 1 blockchain, allowing the use of the mature tools from the Ethereum ecosystem while naturally benefiting from the privacy and compliance features Dusk provides. DeFi protocols and RWA projects already running on mainstream public chains can almost seamlessly migrate over.

Even more exciting is DuskTrade, a real-world asset trading platform. Dusk has formed a deep partnership with NPEX in the Netherlands—don't say you're unfamiliar; NPEX holds EU MTF, Broker, and ECSP licenses, making their compliance capabilities truly robust. DuskTrade has big ambitions: it plans to tokenize over €300 million of traditional securities and bring them on-chain for trading. For European institutional investors, this is like opening a whole new door. In the context of the entire RWA track, this also serves as a compliance demonstration.

On the technical side, the most noteworthy aspect is the implementation approach of "compliance-grade privacy." Dusk has cleverly balanced this through the Hedger protocol in the EVM environment—ordinary users' transaction details are completely confidential, but regulatory agencies or authorized auditors can decrypt and verify when necessary. This satisfies strict privacy regulations like GDPR while avoiding the regulatory nightmare of fully anonymous transactions. For DeFi products and tokenized securities that must undergo regulation, this design is like finding the last missing piece of a long-lost puzzle.

The industry trend is clear: by 2026, the crypto market is moving toward maturity. At this juncture, Dusk's positioning is particularly distinct—it is not here to compete with Ethereum or Solana, but to pave a dedicated channel for financial institutions that have strict KYC/AML requirements, need data privacy protection, and want to enjoy the high efficiency of blockchain. This path may not attract the massive traffic of Main DEXs, but every transaction passing through it shines brightly.