Since its founding in 2018, Dusk has been focused on a very vertical yet precise mission: building a Layer 1 public chain dedicated to serving regulated financial institutions.

Unlike privacy chains that pursue absolute anonymity, Dusk’s approach is more pragmatic — it advocates for "regulated privacy." What does that mean? It means enabling institutions to conduct financial operations on-chain freely and efficiently, with robust privacy protections, while also complying with KYC/AML requirements. Privacy, auditability, and compliance are directly integrated into the protocol’s core, and through modular design, it leaves ample room for applications like compliant DeFi and RWA tokenization.

2026 is indeed a critical milestone for it. The most significant move is the launch of the DuskEVM mainnet in mid-January. This is not just a simple EVM sidechain, but a clever architecture — developers can write contracts using standard Solidity and deploy as usual, but final settlement occurs on Dusk’s underlying privacy-preserving network. In other words, existing DeFi applications can migrate without major code changes, while also gaining protections like zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption.

On the technical side, the Hedger protocol is a highlight. It enables auditable privacy transactions within the EVM environment — regulators can perform audits when needed, while everyday users’ transactions remain confidential.

On the product side, the launch of DuskTrade marks its entry into real asset applications. This is the first practical business related to RWA, and collaborations with multiple partners have already been initiated.