Dusk is an interesting project. Since its establishment in 2018, it has never followed the hype and has been focused on building the underlying infrastructure for a regulated financial system.

In simple terms, it aims to satisfy two seemingly opposing needs: protecting transaction privacy on one hand and meeting compliance auditing requirements on the other. Traditional financial institutions happen to lack this capability.

How does it achieve this? The core relies on cryptographic tools like zero-knowledge proofs. Transaction details are locked in a black box, but compliance can still be verified—similar to a diary locked with a password, with regulators holding a spare key.

This approach directly addresses the pain points of institutions. Imagine issuing bonds: the financing details need to be kept confidential, but the entire process must be subject to regulatory inspection. Dusk exists to solve such problems.

Its architecture is quite flexible. It adopts a modular construction approach, like building with LEGO bricks. Institutions can combine different compliance modules according to their business needs and then build applications suited to them. This greatly reduces development difficulty and time costs.

There has also been tangible progress in ecosystem development. Collaboration with the Dutch licensed exchange NPEX has been implemented, and the DuskTrade platform is officially online, already introducing tokenized securities worth hundreds of millions of euros.

What is the backing behind this? Support from the full suite of EU licenses. This means that the entire chain of trading, settlement, and custody complies with traditional financial regulatory systems, allowing institutional investors to participate with confidence.

The technical barriers are continuously lowering. The DuskEVM mainnet is already live, enabling developers to smoothly migrate smart contracts using the familiar Solidity language, which accelerates the deployment of ecosystem applications.

Network security is guaranteed by a unique consensus mechanism. The design incentivizes more nodes to participate in voting and validation, which enhances both decentralization and security levels.

Community discussion atmosphere is also noteworthy. Whether it’s technical implementation or protocol updates, discussions are very pragmatic, without the blind hype often seen elsewhere.