Recently, I was scrolling Twitter in the early morning and couldn't sleep, so I opened Dusk's official website and white paper. In the crypto world of 2026, there are meme frenzies, AI narratives, and RWA shortcuts everywhere, but this project always makes me feel like it exists in another parallel universe: not chasing trends, not flooding screens, not calling out trades, yet somehow holding back a big move in the most 'boring' places. To be honest, this 'quietly eerie' vibe is becoming more and more addictive.
Everyone knows the two extremes of privacy coins: either completely black box like Monero, which makes institutions run away at first sight; or pretending to be private like some public chains, where everything can actually be seen on-chain. Dusk plays the middle route — 'auditable privacy': transactions are encrypted with zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) for amounts and identities by default, maximizing privacy, but can selectively disclose when regulators need it, perfectly aligning with the EU's MiCA and Travel Rule. In simple terms, it allows institutions to confidently put real money on-chain without the fear of being treated as laundering tools. This is extremely necessary in the current explosive growth of RWA.
The mainnet will be launched in early 2025 (this is not news from 2026, it's from last year). In Q1 of this year, DuskEVM was launched, allowing Solidity developers to directly migrate privacy dApps. Partner NPEX (a licensed exchange in the Netherlands managing hundreds of millions of euros in assets) has already tokenized securities on it, and Chainlink CCIP has also connected cross-chain. This isn't a PPT, there are actually €200M+ of regulated assets flowing on-chain. Compared to those projects that were built for institutions but ended up being retail speculation, Dusk has been aiming for compliant finance from the start, with a clean foundation.
Of course, it also has its pain points: the ecosystem is quiet, the $DUSK price fluctuations aren't that thrilling, and the community isn't as active as meme coins that soar and plunge daily. In the attention economy, being quiet can easily lead to being forgotten. But conversely, if the next regulatory cycle really tightens and the casino model cools down, those 'pure privacy' or 'zero compliance' projects will be the first to die, while Dusk, which is 'both private and able to provide regulatory answers,' may turn into a safe haven. It's not about betting on a 100x return, but rather on the long-term value of crypto slowly maturing and institutions truly coming in.
My current mindset is: not all in, but holding a small position. Not because it will become immensely wealthy, but because it makes me feel that there must be something not so low in this market.@Dusk #dusk $DUSK