In the world of cryptocurrency, few projects dare to confront a core challenge: how to make a fully transparent blockchain meet strict financial regulatory requirements?

The Dusk project has spent over six years contemplating this issue. It is a Layer-1 public chain designed specifically for regulated financial markets. The mainnet was officially launched on January 7, 2025, and has maintained 100% uptime since then. Its positioning is clear—serving as the intersection of privacy and compliance, providing infrastructure for the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA).

**Why is this track worth关注？**

There is a fundamental contradiction between traditional finance and blockchain: financial institutions require compliance, privacy, and auditability, but most public chains choose either full transparency or complete privacy. Dusk’s approach is to achieve both—allowing financial institutions, enterprises, and individuals to issue, trade, and settle real securities assets (stocks, bonds, fund shares, etc.) on the same chain, while complying with EU financial regulations like MiCA and MiFID II, and protecting business privacy and personal data from leaks.

What does this mean? Institutions can bypass expensive third-party intermediaries and conduct financial activities directly on the chain.

**How is the core technology implemented?**

The project employs several key innovations:

First, zero-knowledge proof technology (using the PLONK scheme) combined with confidential smart contracts. This enables transaction amounts, asset holdings, and identity information to remain private, while on-chain data can still be audited—regulators cannot see specific numbers but can verify the validity of the ledger.

Phoenix transaction model and Zedger are another core components. This system achieves complete privacy for transactions while maintaining on-chain auditability—sounds contradictory, but this is precisely Dusk’s innovation.
At the consensus layer, the project adopts a variant of Proof of Stake called SBA (Segregated Byzantine Agreement), incorporating blind auctions, invisible time locks, and reputation systems. This not only enables fast settlement within seconds but also enhances the network’s decentralization.

Another noteworthy plan is DuskEVM, expected to launch by the end of 2025. It is compatible with Ethereum development tools, allowing developers to write privacy-focused financial contracts in Solidity, lowering the development barrier.

**What is the current ecosystem status?**

The project is not starting from zero. Dusk has deep collaborations with the Dutch regulated exchange NPEX, which has become a practical token for its MiCA-compliant centralized exchange. It also partnered with Quantoz to issue the compliant stablecoin EURQ (Euro stablecoin), which is connected to multiple custodian banks.

After the mainnet launch, the main focus is on promoting on-chain tokenization of real assets—stocks, bonds, carbon credits, etc., are all planned. Additionally, Lightspeed L2 (compatible with Ethereum but ultimately settled on the Dusk mainnet) is in planning to further expand the ecosystem.

**What is the role of the DUSK token?**

As the core fuel of the ecosystem, DUSK is used for gas fees, staking for consensus, collateral for asset issuance, governance voting, and more. In the RWA track, the more diverse the practical applications of the token, the stronger the ecosystem’s stickiness.

Overall, Dusk is undertaking a very challenging task—achieving institutional-grade compliance on a fully public chain. This direction is very important for the future of RWAs, especially in the European market. How far it can go ultimately depends on the real-world application and adoption of the ecosystem.