As blockchain technology matures, 2026 may become the turning point for the real-world asset (RWA) industry to truly take off. The Dusk team recently announced that their first RWA application, DuskTrade, is about to go live. This project has established a deep partnership with the regulated Dutch exchange NPEX, which holds multiple financial licenses including EU MTF, Broker, and ECSP, indicating that a compliant foundation has already been laid from a regulatory perspective.

It is reported that DuskTrade will facilitate the onboarding of over €300 million worth of tokenized securities onto the blockchain. This is not just a numbers game—behind it involves institutional-grade on-chain trading, real-time settlement, and built-in privacy protection. Such a combination may seem simple, but it actually touches on long-standing pain points that traditional finance and blockchain have struggled to reconcile.

Where is the problem? Public blockchains offer transparency, but institutional traders are fundamentally unwilling to expose transaction details to the sunlight. Centralized exchanges, while offering privacy, lose the essence of blockchain. The two worlds have been in opposition until the emergence of DuskTrade.

This platform is built on the Dusk Layer 1 network, utilizing the latest DuskEVM and Hedger privacy protocols, aiming to create a truly usable on-chain securities trading ecosystem for institutions. Imagine: tokenized stocks, bonds, private equity, and other assets can be issued and circulated on-chain like standard tokens, with transaction parties settling instantly—no more waiting for the old T+2 clearing cycle.

More importantly, the privacy layer. The Hedger protocol defaults transaction details to privacy, unless regulators or authorized parties need to conduct audits—thus meeting the requirements of regulatory frameworks such as EU MiFID II and CSDR. Institutions can participate with confidence without worrying about compliance risks. This design approach is precisely the key to gaining institutional recognition in the RWA track.