What is the cost of trust in traditional finance? Lawyers, auditors, custodians—each link in the chain conducting due diligence—ultimately all need to be reflected in the balance sheet—those "compliance and audit expenses" are enough to deter small and medium-sized assets. The issue isn't whether to trust or not, but whether the way trust is produced can be fundamentally changed.

Dusk Network's actions over the past two years are essentially answering this question. Its three-layer architecture design, especially the combination of DuskEVM and Hedger engine, is fundamentally building an "automatic trust factory." Tasks that previously required months of manual verification—such as whether a transaction breaches regulatory red lines or whether asset transfers exceed permissions—are now automatically verified using cryptographic proofs.

The collaboration with NPEX is particularly interesting. Think about it—assets like tokenized securities (RWA) on the Dusk protocol layer, where compliance becomes a directly programmable and composable property. The costs for asset issuers and trading platforms to produce "trustworthy proofs" are drastically reduced. This is no small matter—it's a fundamental change to the cost structure of the entire RWA market.

More importantly, the mainnet upgrade is imminent. Once developers can directly invoke these built-in compliance and privacy modules within a convenient EVM environment, a wave of new financial applications will emerge. These applications will be built from day one on a low-cost, verifiable trust foundation—something unimaginable in traditional finance.

What is the value captured by the DUSK token? In essence, it is the entire value flow brought by this "new paradigm of trust production." It pays for the network's security and consensus, which means that all future low-cost, trustworthy financial activities built on this will have their value flow into it.

So, perhaps Dusk's story isn't just about privacy, but about a more fundamental matter: using cryptography and blockchain to turn the most expensive infrastructure in the financial world—trust—into something like electricity. Programmable, measurable, and low-cost. This is the true scope of the entire imagination.