I Revisited DUSK After Months, and the Direction Is Clearer Now
Took a break from watching DUSK closely since summer—too much noise everywhere else. Came back this week, pulled up the explorer, docs, and recent commits, and… damn, things actually feel more coherent than I remembered.
The mainnet isn't just "live"—it's stable. Tx count creeping up week over week, no major outages reported since the Q1 upgrade. The selective disclosure engine that used to feel like a nice-to-have now has real usage: a handful of test settlements where auditors pulled proofs without seeing the full ledger. Small numbers, sure, but it's the kind of proof-of-concept that makes TradFi people stop dismissing it.
Zedger is the part that surprised me most. What started as vaporware talk in 2024 now has actual issuance flows—tokenized corporate notes, some gilts pilots, all with legal wrappers that map back to off-chain enforceability. It's not billions yet, but the plumbing is there, and it's being used by entities that care about MiCA boxes being ticked, not just hype.
Emissions still dilute, yeah—nobody's pretending otherwise—but the fee-burn mechanism kicked in post-upgrade, and early data shows protocol revenue starting to offset some of the new supply. Hyperstaking APY is settling into something reasonable (not 100% APY bait), which seems to be filtering for longer-hold behavior.
The clearest signal after months away? This isn't pivoting anymore. It's doubling down on the same unsexy problem: regulated, private-enough RWAs at institutional scale. The roadmap from 2020 still matches 2026 execution, and that's rarer than it should be.
If you're thinking about revisiting too, skip the daily chart. Watch instead:
Monthly RWA settlement volume (even if it's tiny)
New SDK integrations or forks of the selective disclosure code
Any quiet announcements from NPEX/Euronext-adjacent players
The direction isn't explosive—it's just… solidifying.