Early this year the team flipped on DuskEVM, a second execution layer that still settles on the same chain that Dutch issuers have been piloting since late 2024. Nothing about the switch is cosmetic: the bytecode that banks’ engineers had already audited on Forknet now runs verbatim, while underneath, the native bridge keeps assets in the same accounting domain that the Authority for the Financial Markets already recognises. In short, the network finally behaves like a public ledger when developers want it to, yet still behaves like a security-grade register when supervisors knock.
The architecture works because the project never tried to retrofit compliance onto a tourist chain. It started, in 2018, by asking what a registrar would need if it were rebuilt from scratch: finality in seconds, a record that can be sealed from the public but opened to a judge, and a token that does three jobs at once—pay gas, stake collateral, and serve as the instrument of settlement. Those three jobs are still performed by one asset, so risk officers do not have to price in cross-token volatility when they model settlement exposure.
Issuers that tested the privacy layer last autumn speak about it in the dry language of post-trade efficiency. A single cap-table smart contract replaces three reconciliation spreadsheets; corporate-actions code drops dividends directly into qualified wallets without the registrar touching the shareholder list; auditors receive a zk-proof that the arithmetic is correct, not the list itself. The operational saving is measured in weeks, not basis points, which is why the pipeline of assets waiting to be tokenised has stayed above three hundred million euro even while crypto markets corrected.
The competitive field is no longer other zero-knowledge startups—it is the incumbent CSDs that still batch overnight. Their latency is measured in hours, Dusk’s in blocks, and the gap is wide enough that issuers are willing to absorb the legal cost of dual-listing rather than wait for legacy upgrades. The network’s head start is not the maths; it is the licence wrapper that already satisfies the Dutch implementation of the DLT Pilot Regime, something the general-purpose chains are still negotiating province by province.
Developers who wandered in during January’s testnet period found tooling that feels familiar: Foundry scripts deploy without alteration, block times sit at five seconds, and gas is priced in the same unit that secures the consensus layer. What feels unfamiliar is the optional shielding: a single boolean in the transaction object flips a trade from public to encrypted, yet the block explorer still displays enough metadata for front-ends to calculate prices. No new language, no new wallet, no wrapped token—just a flag that compliance officers can toggle.
Market-making firms are beginning to treat the native DUSK token as a settlement coin rather than a speculative position. Because the same collateral can be staked to validate blocks, firms that would otherwise park cash in repo can instead post tokens, earn inflation rewards, and still meet intraday liquidity rules. The circular flow—issue, stake, trade, settle—keps velocity inside the network and reduces the reflexive selling that plagues gas-only tokens.
The remaining friction is legal, not technical. Each member state still writes its own annex to the European regulation, so an asset that is freely transferable in Amsterdam may need a side letter in Vienna. The team’s response has been to hard-code jurisdiction flags into the asset metadata, letting issuers pre-program transfer restrictions instead of maintaining them off-chain. Early pilots show that the small increase in deployment cost is offset by the elimination of manual whitelist management.
Looking forward, the roadmap is less about new features than about scaling the same guarantees: more provisioner slots to absorb higher trade frequency, cross-chain proofs so that assets can visit other DeFi venues without leaving the compliance orbit, and a privacy VM that will let structured-product desks keep their Greeks confidential even while the underlying clears on a public bulletin. None of these steps rely on hypothetical breakthroughs; each is an engineering increment that can be scheduled like any other enterprise deliverable.
If the wider tokenisation narrative continues to move from proof-of-concept to balance-sheet line items, the networks that survive will be the ones that surrendered either privacy or compliance last, not first. Dusk’s bet is that regulators will not relax their disclosure expectations, and institutions will not relax their privacy needs. By building both properties into the same layer, the project has turned what looked like a paradox into a moat—one that is already deep enough that issuers are paying to cross it rather than waiting for someone else to build a bridge.
