In 2023, $DUSK looked like one of those projects that kept building while the market kept yawning. The key turning point was the roadmap refresh in 2023 that framed mainnet as a 2024 mission, which instantly created two camps in the community: builders who liked the long game, and traders who treated the word “ #Roadmap ” like a “maybe later” sticker. That split became Dusk’s first big challenge of the period: attention. Privacy + compliance is not a meme-friendly combo, and the bear-market mindset punished anything that did not ship loudly. But the project direction stayed consistent: a privacy-focused L1 designed for financial applications and real-world asset workflows, where “compliance-ready” is not marketing paint but part of the design constraints.
Then 2024 arrived with the kind of progress that forces a new conversation. The Incentivized Testnet (ITN) was announced as one of the final stages before mainnet, and it came with very concrete participation design: staking using ERC20 #dusk on Ethereum, node running on the testnet, snapshots for future POAP claims, and a defined reward pool for stakers set at 2.5 million $DUSK . Suddenly the narrative was not “someday mainnet” but “a measurable participation window with rules.” That shift is where trader reactions started changing, because traders love dates, pools, and on-chain mechanics more than inspirational sentences.
The bigger challenge underneathwas harder than testnet logistics regulation pressure. By mid-2024, Dusk publicly explained that an earlier plan (launching April) was disrupted by regulatory changes, forcing major parts of the tech stack to be rebuilt to satisfy institutional, exchange, and regulatory needs. In trader terms, this was the “delay risk” chapter; in builder terms, it was the “survive the RW” chapter. The mood in 2023 often sounded like doubt (will it ship?). The mood in 2024 started sounding like filtering (does this chain actually fit exchanges and institutions?). That is a different kind of attention: less hype, more evaluation.
