Recently spent quite some time tinkering on the DuskEVM testnet, purely out of curiosity about the "compliance + privacy" route. I wanted to see what kind of balance a public chain can find between privacy protection and regulatory friendliness.

First, let's talk about the real experience. Connecting to the testnet is not difficult—just add an RPC configuration in MetaMask (Chain ID 745), and it’s ready to use immediately. Deploying smart contracts, transferring funds, and other basic operations run smoothly, with block confirmation delays basically at the second level, and gas costs are nearly negligible. The technical foundation here is indeed solid.

What’s more interesting is the dual-mode design. In Phoenix mode, transaction information is encrypted—you can’t see the amount or the counterparty, only the transaction hash and ZK zero-knowledge proof—this layer of privacy protection is truly effective. Moonlight maintains an open ledger logic, with both modes running in parallel, allowing users to choose based on their needs. This design approach is quite rare in the industry and also very considerate.

But real-world problems are also evident. The testnet ecosystem is somewhat cold—active applications are few, and most addresses found in the explorer are traces of internal testing. This stands in stark contrast to Dusk’s grand goal of serving RWA assets worth hundreds of millions of euros. To put it plainly, institutions simply wouldn’t participate with real funds in an environment without genuine licensing backing or risk isolation—there’s a huge gap between testing enthusiasm and institutional trust.

This is also why DuskTrade paired with projects like NPEX, which are actually on-chain, is so important for Dusk. Good technical indicators alone are not enough; real business scenarios are needed to validate. Dusk’s accumulation of compliance licenses and its choice of EVM compatibility theoretically lay the foundation for these applications. But from the current state of the testnet, there’s still a lot of work to do from concept to large-scale real-world application.