When I trace #Dusk back to its earliest days, what stands out isn’t a slogan or a trend. It’s the problem choice. In 2018, while the industry was busy shipping fast and loud, Dusk formed around a painfully real contradiction: public blockchains had liquidity and openness, but were unusable for confidential finance; private networks had privacy, but no real market access or composability. Dusk didn’t pick a side — it tried to build the middle lane on purpose.
The founding mindset: solve the “public vs private” dead-end
The early team composition makes sense when you look at the goal. Emanuele Francioni and Fulvio Venturelli were there from the start, and the broader early group included business-side operators like Jelle Pol, Pascal Putman, and Mels Dees — not because “team lists” matter, but because regulated finance is half cryptography and half strategy. You can’t ship markets with privacy and compliance if you only speak one language.
Funding was the signal: patience over velocity
A detail I always watch in infrastructure projects is whether funding made them rush… or gave them breathing room. Coverage around 2020 describes @Dusk landing a sizable raise (reported as €7.4M in that period), alongside separate reporting on additional capital being raised to push regulated market infrastructure forward. Either way, the bigger signal is: they didn’t behave like a “launch first, fix later” chain. They behaved like people trying to build a financial rail that regulators and institutions could actually touch.
Fast-forward: 2026 is where the thesis starts turning into a product
If you’ve been around long enough, you know a lot of “compliance chains” never graduate from whitepaper language. What’s different now is that Dusk is framing 2026 as an execution year: DuskEVM, regulated finance apps, and the kind of infrastructure upgrades that only matter if you intend to be used at scale.
The real-world anchor: NPEX and regulated rails
The NPEX thread is one of the most meaningful datapoints in Dusk’s story because it isn’t a random “partnership banner.” $DUSK has publicly tied its regulated-finance direction to NPEX, describing a framework where regulated applications and tokenized securities can live with privacy and compliance built into the protocol design.
For me, Dusk’s credibility will come down to something simple: do regulated assets actually move on-chain with the right privacy guarantees — and do builders show up because the EVM layer makes it easy? Dusk’s mission statement is bold (institution-grade assets to anyone’s wallet), but the coming proof is adoption: apps, issuance, markets, and repeated usage under real constraints.