@Dusk began as a quietly ambitious project in 2018 and its token generation and public trading activity came together in mid-2019, with the TGE / trade launch recorded in July 2019. From the start the team framed Dusk not as another generic smart-contract chain but as plumbing for regulated finance: privacy built into the protocol, auditability when a regulator or custodian needs sight, and token standards meant for securities and compliant instruments rather than pure utility tokens.
Binance put a brighter spotlight on DUSK in July 2019 when it listed the token (initially naming the BEP2 version as the default withdrawable asset), which materially improved liquidity and exchange access for the project. The project has since focused its narrative and engineering on use cases like tokenized securities, custody-friendly settlement flows and pilot tokenizations with regulated venues rather than chasing the high-TVL DeFi playbook — you’ll therefore see modest on-chain DeFi TVL compared with the big general-purpose L1s, but a different set of signals matters here: regulatory partnerships, exchange pilots and custodial integrations.
Binance
If you want a market snapshot: as of today, January 20, 2026, CoinMarketCap’s live feed shows DUSK trading in the low-to-mid fractions of a dollar with 24-hour volumes in the hundreds of millions depending on the data provider; those numbers move minute by minute, so take the figure as a precise-to-this-second snapshot rather than a permanent truth. On the fundraising side, public fundraising trackers and token sale records indicate structured funding and token distribution events around the 2018–2019 window with several million raised in early rounds and a staged issuance designed to support ecosystem incentives rather than a one-shot pump-and-dump
Crucially, Dusk has recently been pushing the mainnet and regulatory integration story — the team announced a mainnet milestone in 2024 and market updates in January 2026 highlight tokenization deals and integrations with regulated venues, which is exactly the kind of traction that validates the project’s thesis if you care about real-world asset (RWA) flows rather than ephemeral TVL spikes.
Bottom line: Dusk isn’t trying to be the loudest yield farm; it’s building rails so a licensed issuer, exchange or custodian can tokenize bonds, securities or other regulated products and have them settle with privacy and auditable controls intact. If you’re after projects that aim for institutional compatibility and real-world asset programs, Dusk’s progress and partnerships are the signals worth watching it’s utility-first, compliance-minded infrastructure rather than hype. 
