In the second week of January 2026, DuskEVM mainnet officially launched. This is not just a simple technical upgrade—it represents a mature privacy Layer 1 tailored specifically for institutional finance.

Since its establishment in 2018, Dusk's development logic has always been clear: under strict regulatory frameworks, to build a trustworthy underlying layer for on-chain real assets, compliant DeFi, and institutional business. To be honest, many public chains swing back and forth between privacy and compliance, even choosing one over the other. Dusk is different—it has set "privacy but auditable" as a fundamental principle from the very architecture design, which truly eliminates the biggest concern of traditional finance going on-chain.

Talking about core competitiveness, its modular architecture is indispensable. The underlying consensus layer focuses on performance and security, while the application layer provides a native Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible environment through DuskEVM. The benefit for developers is—no need to learn a new language, write in Solidity as usual, and deploy smart contracts directly to Dusk's Layer 1, with transactions automatically inheriting privacy features supported by zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption.

A more detailed aspect is the Hedger protocol. It allows developers to implement selective data disclosure within the EVM environment—hiding sensitive commercial information while opening a full audit trail during regulatory review. This design uniquely enables Dusk to handle both privacy protection and KYC/AML compliance, which are usually conflicting needs.

After the mainnet launch, the ecosystem's institutional-friendly features began to emerge. Banks, asset management firms, and licensed exchanges no longer need to worry about balancing privacy and risk control, as they can directly build their on-chain financial services on Dusk. Tokenization of real assets, institutional-level DeFi, cross-chain clearing—these once-theoretical concepts are gradually being realized on Dusk's infrastructure.

Overall, the launch of DuskEVM signifies that privacy blockchains have moved from an idealistic stage into a practical phase for institutional applications.