As of January 2026, the Dusk mainnet has been running stably for 512 days without any major failures. On-chain transaction count has surpassed 2.8 million, active addresses remain around 3,800, and staked DUSK tokens are stable at 120 million (about 12% of the total supply of 1 billion).

At first glance, these numbers seem quite ordinary—growth isn't explosive, TVL hasn't skyrocketed, and the token price has been sideways for a long time. From the outside, it looks like a "lukewarm" project.

But if you dig into the details of the tokenomics, you'll find that Dusk faces a pretty painful identity crisis: it was supposed to be a bearer of institutional trust, yet it was thrown into an ecosystem entirely driven by market logic.

**What exactly is the token used for?**

The design purposes of DUSK are actually threefold: First, governance voting rights—holders can vote on proposals like protocol upgrades and parameter adjustments; second, staking participation in consensus—you can stake DUSK to support validators, with an annualized return of around 3-4%; third, Gas payments—although currently Gas is mainly priced in fiat currency, DUSK can also be used.

Here's a crucial detail—before any governance proposal enters voting, it must first pass the MiCA compliance review by the foundation's legal team. In other words, your voting rights have a ceiling; they can't overturn the system itself, only make adjustments within a compliant framework. The token isn't a "sovereign tool," but more like a "participation credential within the system."

The benefits of this design are obvious—protocols won't run into regulatory red lines because of a radical proposal. The downside? The decentralization narrative is somewhat weakened—you have voting rights, but you can't challenge the fundamental rules of the game.